As I awoke yesterday morning, I turned on Classic FM in my downstairs lounge which is of my daily routine little habits. A rendition was played of ‘In the deep midwinter’ which is quite a well known with words I think by Christina Rosetti. However, ClassicFM chose to play a very slow and moving rendition picked out slowly on a classical guitar and I found it utterly transfixing. I have a suspicion that ClassicFM which boasts that it is ‘the home of Christmas music’ is trying to be a tad more sophisticated this year because it seems to be hunting out and playing versions of carols that are played on a solo piano or guitar and as well as adding variation, this makes listening to carols even more enjoyable when it is not the same old version being belted out over and over again. The Office of National Statistics (ONS) have just released figures to show that we are all worse off than we were six years ago. The average person now has £38 less to spend each month after tax than they did at the end of 2024, following three consecutive quarters of falling UK living standards. The government made ‘improving living standards across all every part of the UK’ one of their most high profile targets to achieve before the next election. The previous parliament, between December 2019 and July 2024, was the first in recorded British history to oversee a fall in disposable income in real terms. But disposable income is now £1 lower per month than it was in summer 2019 after adjusting for inflation, according to Monday’s updated figures from the Office for National Statistics, and more than £20 lower than in December 2019. It is no surprise, therefore, that the two major political parties of Labour and the Tories who have been in power during this dismal period and now being spurned by the electorate and this is a marked political shift to the political Right (in the form of the Reform party) and to the left (with the resurgence of the Greens, but no way as pronounced as the shift to the right) So our politics may appear increasingly fractured in the course of the forthcoming year and who knows hat might happen on the other side of the Atlantic. My own little prediction is that Trump will suffer a health episode and some of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) Republicans are already throwing their weight behind the Vice President, J D Vance, as the best way of carrying the Trump legacy forward for eight more years after this Presidency comes to an end.

I feel that I will be glad when this particular day is over and particularly the morning when I have to negotiate both Pilates and the Santa Claus visit. But beforehand, I need to decant and prepare some of the damson gin which is Santa’s normal Christmas gift to fellow class members at this time of year so it is going to be quite a busy morning as I still have to do some unpacking and restoration to their rightful place things taken with me for my Yorkshire visit. The morning then turned out to be a very busy one as I realised that I needed to get some bottles of damson gin prepared for my Pilates class. I was very short of bottles but managed to fill five of them , label them up and then wrap them in Christmas paper. Then I went down and had my Pilates class  during the last five minutes of which I crept out into the toilet to change into my full Santa Claus outfit and then back into the classroom to distribute my bottles of gin to everyone. In return, two of my classmates had also prepared some strawberry vodka so I actually took two bottles home with me. My Droitwich friend had just completed her yoga class and then she called around and we spent a happy afternoon and evening with each other, collaborating with each other and cooking a prawn meal together. We are both of us relieved that we have got our various bits of work and other commitments out of the way before Christmas Eve which cannot come soon enough for the both of us. We have slightly different plans this Christmas time as my son and daughter-in-law are coming over on Christmas Eve and we will have some time and a meal together, The next day which is Christmas Day is going to be a great collaborative effort because my son and daughter-in-law will be responsible for cooking the main course (Lamb shanks) whilst I am responsible for both the starters and the sweets which should be relatively straight forward. Last year, I cooked Christmas dinner on my own and it was all a bit of a disaster although the identical meal prepared at New Year went off without a hitch.

There are some interesting details emerging from the latest tranche of Epstein files. It appears that a crucial person identified as ‘A’ is implicated procuring  girls in the whole Epstein enterprise and this ‘A’ may well be the Andrew (ex-Prince Andrew) so the ramifications of all of this seem very serious for the British royal family. Details of this are yet to emerge fully and it may be that it will be several days before we get a fuller picture. Meanwhile there is a bigger domestic political story. In a massive Christmas U-turn by Sir Keir Starmer, the government has announced a huge climbdown on inheritance tax on farmers. The tax relief on family farms handed down between families is to increase from £1m to £2.5m, meaning only farms worth more than £5m will pay. The climbdown, overturning bitterly unpopular proposals in Rachel Reeves’s budget last year, follows a personal intervention by the prime minister. The National Farmers Union (NFU) president Tom Bradshaw revealed the government backed down after he had two ‘very constructive meetings’ with the PM. So after a great deal of political damage, it appears that the government have realised that their initial proposals on the inheritance tax payable on working firms needed more thought and we now have the interesting scenario that after the last election, many of the newly elected Labour MPs in rural constituencies are coming to terms with the realities of the rural economy for the first time. 

For a reason I cannot quite discern, I have the knack of waking up literally one or two minutes before the hour and this facility has not deserted me because I awoke at 5.59 yesterday morning – I allowed myself to stay in bed for an extra half hour before getting up to start my day in which I need to pack up and then get started on my journey home back to Bromsgrove. When I returned back to my hotel bedroom after the Christmas meal with my family, I stumbled into the film ‘Oppenheimer’ the once so-called ‘father of the atomic bomb’ Here I performed my usual trick of watching most of the very long film which was nearly three hours long and, after climbing into bed, falling asleep in the last quarter of an hour. As it was broadcast on BBC I can always get it on catch-up should I feel so inclined. This morning as I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror I muttered to my myself as my fair was all uncombed that I looked like the ‘Wild man of Borneo’. This was the caption to an illustration to which I must have been exposed as a young child in the conservative 1950’s and must have ben derived from an implicit racism in the encylopaedias that I may have read which themselves were probably written in the 1930’s but I have not managed as yet to track down the origins of the expression. In the evening before yesteday, I realise that I needed to get the correct QR codes loaded onto my phone ready for my journey during the day. I used the laptop to locate the relevant file from ‘The Trainline’ which contained the QR code for the journey home and then forwarded it again to myself on my email thus ensuring it was the first item to be found in the email and thus accessible easily on my phone and also when I need it. So many people now use this system that to actually see cardboard tickets being produced is quite rare as every man ad his dog seems to be using smart phones these days.Contemplating the next few days before Christmas, I realise there is quite a lot to be done if I do not wish to leave everything to Christmas Eve. So I am minded to go for my Christmas shopping in the late afternoon of Monday after I have returned home. Then I need to ensure that I have some supplies of damson gin, which will need some bottling to be done, ready for my Pilates class on Tuesday and my annual performance as ‘Sant Claus’ for the benefit of my class mate. This involved waiting until the last five minutes of the class when we traditionally have a period of ‘relaxation’ and then creeping out into the nearby toilets so I can perform a quick change before I make my entrance. I might forego the normal little ditty that I used to sing (‘A variation on the Christmas song of ‘I saw Mummy kissing Santa Claus’) to which I used to supply my own words) Fortunately, there is the minimum of Christmas presents to be wrapped up this year as my son and I have come to an understanding not to give each other Christmas presents this year) One little tradition which my Yorkshire family has evidently engaged for years is for family members to buy (or more likely make) little cloth creatures which can be animals, birds, angels or what-have-you which are then hung on the tree but preserved as tree decorations from one year to the next. As some of these deoration can be decades old, then they act as a remindder of both the gift donor as well as the gift recipient. Of course, every family has its own little traditions and rituals – one of mine used to make an exceptionally ‘stiff’ dry martini which was drunk in the late morning and meant that the final preparations for Christmas dinner were always performed under the influence of some happy alcohol-induced euphoria. This year, I have been detailed to supply the starters and sweets for the Christmas dinner but my Yorkshire family had prepared a huge sherry-enriched trifle which was highly appreciated.

So now I started my train journey back home. I caught an express train from Harrogate to Leeds but was only allowed about 12 minutes to find the new connection. This involved a long walk along the platform, rapid consultation  of the departures board where it detailed the 11.15 as going to Exeter and then I had a walk, a ride in a lift, a walk along the bridge and down again so I got to my connection with only 3 minutes to spare. I did not have time to examination the list of intermediate stations on the departure board but reasoned that this was the only departure and surely a train. going cross country would have to make a call at Birmingham New Street. But the train manager who was evidently a bit overwhelmed failed to mention Birmingham New Street when she read out a list of visiting stations and it was only when we got to Tamworth that we were informed that Birmingham New Street would be our next port of call. So I was in a state of some anxiety that I was actually on the right train and the train being so crowded, it took way beyond the allocated time to get passengers on and off the train and so we were eventuakly running about 10 minutes. This gave me about three or four minutes to catch the Bromsgrove connection so I made a dash to the platform from which the Bromsgrove usually departs. It was one minute late, I was thirty seconds late but I did catch my allocated drain with 30 seconds to spare. My son and I had made a prior arrangement to pick me up and I was very pleased to see him and he had even brought over a bit of spare food which just needed a quick burst in the microwave. After I had eaten, I visited ny local groceery store and go the ‘Christmas’ shopping done quite quickly and as I was unpacking got a welcome call from my Droitwich friend. She popped over so that we could spend a pleasant evening together which we did and we are both contemplating exercise classes, yoga in the case of my friend and my regular Pilates (plus a quick flash of Santa Claus) for myself.

I had a better night’s sleep than the night before so am left to contemplate the prospects for the day ahead. I am always a bit relieved when the technology available to me works as intended and, after an initial hitch, I got a network established for my laptop and even got the rather temperamental TV tuned to Sky News for the morning’s news. I was rather in two minds whether or not to treat myself to a really good, cooked breakfast in the hotel this morning as I have run out of provisions although there is a very reliable little shop which should open across the road and which I generally use to keep me in supplies. It is always good to connect with members of one’s family at this time of year ad I started off my meetings with them by looking at a collection of photos on my iphone which I have in a ‘Favourites’ section and where I explain the context and significance of each photo. For the family, I then show them some photos of my family which they, or the younger members of the family, might never have seen before. One photo is on of my grandmother taken in about 1910 where the evidently black-and-white photo of the time and my grandmother was photographed in a magnificent bonnet and possible set of clothes and a backdrop which the photographers of the time may have supplied whilst the photo itself has been painted or otherwise colorised. Another intriguing photo is one that a very distant Australian cousin interested in the family history unearthed some years ago and it is showing a photograph of a display stand in an exhibition devoted to ‘Hart Cycle Company’ Some subsequent research reveals that probably a great grandfather established this company in Wolverhampton which shows that, deep down, I actually have some roots in the West Midlands rather than in Yorkshire which is the county in which I was raised  and to which I have always tended to affiliate. No doubt, these photos will come out again today if only for the erudition of the younger members of the family that I will meet today for whom all of this may be a complete revelation. I might just take along this laptop as well because I have a collection of photos which more or less mirror Meg’s life and which younger members of the family may not have seen and these are collected together on one of those professional photo websites. At some later in the day, I will go along to my nieces house in Harrogate for a pleasant pre-Christmas meal but I have some of the morning spare so I am minded to pick up a copy of the Sunday newspaper from the little shop across the road and then to have a leisurely read in the warmth and comfort of the downstairs lounge rather than just staying in my bedroom all of the morning. The weather is a bit too cold and inhospitable for a morning stroll which I did on the occasion of my last visit here. In the event, this is exactly what I did having a leisurely time reading my Sunday newspaper, doing some Soduko and ensuring that the ‘Favourites’ section of my photo collection on the iphone is augmented a little. I have already received a text from niece telling me time she is going to pick me up so I am getting the bits and together that I wish to take along with me.

So my niece came to collect us for the family meal and we were eventually joined by one of niece’s children and her two grandchildren aged about 4 and 2 years old together with her husband, another niece with her long term boyfriend amd a third niece who was preparing for her ‘A’-levels.Together with my niece and her hsuband and my sister and I, we were a party of eleven altogether. We sat down to a meal of honey-glazed gammon, served with roast potatoes, carrots, red cabbage and parsnips together withan a range of pickles. So we had a magnificent pre-Christmas meal after which I showed off both some of the favourites on my own iphone and a website with a collection of photos most of which are arranged in such a way that they form a commentary upon Meg’s life as a whole. Then members of the family had to leave for a long journey back up to Newcastle from whence they had journeyed for the meal and then my sister needed to be transported back to her residential home. This is proving to be quite difficult for my sister but we are living in hopes that after one very successful Christmas get together, there will be the opportunity for even more as the occasion arises. But it is true to say that my sister’s mobility is getting somewghat worse and mirros, to some extent, the same problems that I experienced with Meg when she was alive. I noticed yesterday whilst in Harrogate in the railway station that ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ is being put on by Opera North during most of February so I might grab the opportunity for another trip north to see the opera and my family as well. So I received and made a couple of texts before I was taken home by my niece at the end of  delightful day. I managed to coax the reluctant TV into showing me a compilation programme of Victoria Wood’s favourite pieces which is always worth a watch. I am going to leave the packing up before my journey tomorrow to the early morning after I had got up for the day and then trust that the journey back on a Monday in the middle of the day proves unproblematic.

As we had surmised, some extra photos thate should have shown Donald Trump have been released and then withdrawn. One of them shows Donald Trump surrounded by young women in swim suits but it appears that somewhere in the White House, this has been seen as being problematic and seems to have been withdrawn. The Democrats are immediately crying ‘foul’ and it looks as though this sort of activity will increase over the days and weeks ahead. It seems unlikely that any really incriminating photographs as such will be found but the smoking gun may well lie in the documentation such as notes that are already coming to light indicating that young women need to be procured for eventual ‘work’ 

I thought that I had brought everything away with me that I could possibly need and whilst this was true of what you might call kitchenware equipment, I found that I had forgotten to bring away my computer mouse with me. This is not as calamitous as it sounds because the laptop (a MacBook in my case) has a very good inbuilt trackpad which some experienced users prefer to a mouse. But in my case, I had hardly used the trackpad so there are various things that I literally did not know. So I needed to consult the web to discover how to perform the  equivalent of a right click on a computer mouse and the answer is surprisingly simple if you know how, being a two fingered tap on the trackpad which is fine once you act actually know about it. Similarly the ‘Delete’ function had to be learnt as there is no button actually labelled ‘Delete’ on my MacBook so I had to learn that this is done by a combination of Control+Back Space which, again, works fine once you know about it. So last night took me quite a long time and some experimentation how to put my blog to bed but the time spent alone in my hotel bedroom was not really wasted because I have learnt how to do things without a mouse that I did not know beforehand. I did not sleep particularly well in a strange bed although the room is well designed and perfect for my needs with a good desk upon which I can put the laptop and a suitable plug point nearby, which is not always the case.   In the event, I got up some time before 4.00am and spent some time installing and deleting apps on my laptop  and generally maintaining things before I started to get into a more routine from 6.00am onwards. The news media is full of details of the newly released Epstein files which should have been published in full by last Friday. In practice, the Trump administration has only released the first tranche in which, surprise! surprise! Bill Clinton appears very well represented but Trump is shown only in one photograph although we know from the White House Chief of staff that Trump has been warned that there is some material relating to him which will have to be released eventually. It seems that the White House has a strategy to release anything that shows the Democrats in a bad light and then hope that the public as a whole gets bored so that in a couple of weeks time (just after Christmas?) people will be bored by it all and the damage that might accrue to Trump is correspondingly limited. Having made an early start to the day, though, I will have to ensure that I am all washed, scrubbed and fed and leave the hotel by about 8.30am as I need to walk into town, do some present shopping for my sister and some wine for Sunday and then catch the train to Knaresborough and back again to see my other niece later on in the afternoon. So I need to keep a careful watch on my train times and how long it will take me to access the stations.

I made my way into town but there was a very cold freezing fog as I walked into town. I made my way into Marks and Spencers and bought a bottle of wine for consumption at the meal tomorrow. At my niece’s instigation, I bought a variety of fruit and some Belgian chocolates to provide a composite Christmas present but in the absence of wrapping paper, I had them packed into a seasonal Marks and Spencer bag and gave strict instructions that they were not to be opened until Christmas Day itself. My sister and I talked over some of the grief stricken moments that we had both experienced during the deaths of our respective spouses but we mainly talked over family matters until the time came for lunch. I accompanied my sister to the beautiful dining room where the care home provided me with a lunch of beef stroganoff on rice with side vegetables followed by a jam sponge and custard. I thought that the quality of the food was pretty good for institutional cooking and the whole ambience of the dining room approached restaurant standards.  I am going to see my sister again the following day at one of her nieces so I took the opportunity to depart an hour earlier and  managed to get to the station on time with it only taking about 15 minutes brisk walk to reach the station. I was pleased to get my hotel bedroom but the TV proved to be problematic and I could not get it to find any TV signal. Then I had a marvellous couple of hours with my niece and her husband and very intelligent son after which I returned to my room, informing the young man on reception about the problems I was having with the TV in my room. Fortunately for me, he made the offer to leave the reception desk and to sort out the TV for me but I could not really follow the exact sequences of commands that he performed to get things going again. I have the TV tuned to Sky News where it will be tuned for the rest of my stay here in any case. 

There is still a lot of controversy concerning the release of the latest Epstein files. Firstly, the release so far has only been a partial release despite the fact that legally the whole of the material should have been released. Secondly, the material released so far seems to have been carefully selected so that no criticism of Donald Trump is at all evidenced whereas there is plenty of adverse publicity for the likes of Bill Clinton. But thirdly, it is evident that a huge amount of redaction has taken place some of which is no doubt legally justified but the suspicion remains that much of the redaction is designed to avoid any embarrassment for the current regime in the White House. Over 500 pages of the files have been entirely redacted leaving many independent commentators to suspect that a huge cover up is taking place. When further material is released, it may well be well into the Christmas festivities when it is felt that the attention of the population and the media lies elsewhere.

The evening before yesterday, I had got most of my packing done for my Yorkshire trip but then decided I would make a lightning trip over to Droitwich for a quick half an hour in other’s company before my little trip up North. This I did and we had a quick meal together which my friend threw together and then  returned home ready for a viewing of the Jane Austen ‘Pride and Prejudice’ This version was showing for exactly two hours and I stayed awake for the first one hour and fifty minutes of it before falling asleep just before the classic denouement at the end of the novel, only to wake up later and find myself in the middle of the film which followed it which was a showing of ‘Whisky Galore’ So this was an element of frustration but it has happened before when I have watched films from the comfort of a warm bed. I made sure that I had a couple of alarms set for early the next day so that I should not oversleep as there is always some last minute flying around before a long trip. I am well used to what might be called ‘hotel catering’ culture and I am taking with me some extra things and some things that I know will be useful such as extra waste bin liners for the storage and eventual disposal of any packaging for any little foodstuffs that I might buy from the little shop across the road from the hotel as I tend not to avail myself of the huge breakfasts that the hotel will provide. By sending out a series of texts several days beforehand, I have managed to meet up with some family members over the next few days and, evidently, there will be a lot of family news upon which to catch up. With various friends and acquaintances, I have made the observation that I thought that the dark days of the autumn would prove to be a great travail but instead the weeks seem to have flown by and I can scarcely believe that we are more than half way through December already. At this time of year, I like to ensure that I have calendars of the type that I particularly like I place for the start of the New Year and I do actually have most of these already in place. Before I see my sister on Saturday morning, I shall be able to stroll along some of the pedestrianised streets of Harrogate and perhaps make last minute purchases of things I need before the festive season descends on us with a vengeance.  I generally look forward to train journeys but the Friday in the week before Christmas might prove to be particularly busy and I nearly always have to first locate my seat in the relevant carriage and then turf the inevitable occupant out of it. Having done a similar journey several times before means that at least I have a rough idea of the platforms from which my various connections generally depart and this is always useful.

Having got to Harrogate, I purchased my tickets for my trip to see my sister tomorrow in Knaresborough and then when to a Chinese restaurant that I know very well. There I had the most enormous lunch of fried rice with beef, washed down with some China tea – the son of the restaurant owner is a real ‘foodie’ so we were soon swapping photographs of food dishes that we had on our respective phones. Then I got to the hotel, unpacked and then got some vital supplies such as fresh milk by which time most of the afternoon had gone. I had arranged to meet with one of my nieces in the hotel reception and then we shared a coffee and a drink with each other spending the early evening together. On occasions like this, we always have a lot of family history and family relationships to discuss and, of course, we both have some relevant photos to show to each other best part of two hours in each other’s company. When my niece departed, I almost but not quite got engulfed in a local Christmas part that was being held for members of a local gym but then I needed to get up to my bedroom to finish off this blog and reply to some messages. My niece and I often share detailed discussions about both parents and particularly grandparents where sometimes family ‘secrets’ get revealed but often it is a case of filling parts of a picture most of which we know but there are always details that one of us to get imparted to the other. Before I came up to Yorkshire on this occasion, I brought with me some of the magazines that detail some of the TV programmes so helps to push the solitude of staying alone in a hotel bedroom away somewhat. But I realise that when I meet the younger generations of the family, I must make particular effects to find out about their issues and concerns and not just be seen as a really distant relative who just turns up once or twice a year. Wandering through the streets of Harrogate as I do, I sometimes wonder whether it is at all likely that I will bump into anybody by chance that I could possibly know, given that I spent most of my formative years and did not leave it until 1963. But that was 62 years ago, so the chances of my actually meeting or even recognising anybody that I knew in those days must be vanishingly small. Many members of my family did have periods of working and livings in, for example, the capital London) but in the end they all seemed to gravitate back into the orbit of Yorkshire. So in many ways, I feel like a planet that broke away from the pull of the solar system of the family by working first in London, then in Manchester followed by  of Leicester and finally Winchester  before going to live in Bromsgrove. But I am forcibly reminded that many of the population stay within a few miles of their birth as I am quite forcibly reminded when I visit the Methodist Centre in Bromsgrove as a source of contacts and so many have been brought up within a few miles of where they are currently living. Of course, as generations age, older and widowed members of the family often move to be closer to their families of origin which I suppose makes sense so that they can provide mutual sources of support to each other.  

Yesterday evening, I spent a couple of hours watching the latest film in the Sky Arts season on all things Mozart. The programme was devoted to an examination of the life of his sister, Maria Anna often known as Nannerl who in her early years was a very talented performer on the harpsichord. For this reason, their father Leopold took both the young Mozart and his sister on tour as musical prodigies and of her talent s a performer there is no doubt. Maria Anna Mozart (1751-1829), nicknamed Nannerl, was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s older sister, a musical prodigy on harpsichord and piano who toured Europe with him as a child, but whose performing and composing career was curtailed by societal expectations for women, with most of her own compositions lost to history despite evidence of their existence in letters. She was a celebrated performer in her own right, often dazzling audiences, and collaborated musically with Wolfgang, but after marrying, she was discouraged from music, becoming a tragic symbol of suppressed female talent. In all probability she composed some pieces in her own right and we know this from correspondence with her father and brother. But these pieces are either lost, never published or simply attributed to her brother. We know from a parallel case, that of Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn that Fanny composed several pieces but they were published with her brother’s signature on them as though they were his. So the search is on amongst musical scholars whether we can discern any of the early works that can now be attributed to his sister but a complicating factor this that Mozart himself played about with variations of his own signature so a non-match between two signatures does not point inevitably to his sister. But having been a prodigy in her own right and often playing pieces that Mozart had composed either on her own or together, their father stopped taking his daughter on tour when she attained the age of 15 and from the age of 18 she seems to have musically ‘disappeared’ We now know that she married and lived in a large house where she practised on her piano for three hours a day but unheard by anyone. But after the death of her husband and at the age of about 50 she returned to Salzburg where she reestablished her credentials as a noted performer in her own right. And we now know quite a lot of Mozart’s early life from what his sister had written about him which forms the elements of the first biography. There are some modern day female musicians who are intensely interested in the life of Nannerl and who take inspiration from her as she was forced to hide and suppress her own talent in keeping with the conventions of the day.

On a completely different subject, an interesting finding has emerged on the development of Alzheimer’s disease from which Meg died. Alzheimer’s disease is more widespread in people above the age of 85 than previously thought, a pioneering study has suggested. Researchers used a simple blood test to search for biomarkers associated with the development of dementia. The study also found more than one in 10 people over the age of 70 would meet the criteria for drugs that can slow down the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Researchers at King’s College London, University of Gothenburg and Stavanger University Hospital analysed 11,486 blood samples provided by people over the age of 57 taking part in the Trondelag Health Study (HUNT) in Norway. They looked for how regularly proteins in the blood that have been linked to cognitive impairment came up, or the gradual deterioration in thinking, memory and reasoning. The frequency of Alzheimer’s disease neuropathological changes (ADNC) – deposits of proteins in the brain that lead to the death of nerve cells – grew with age, according to the analysis. The study found it was higher in older people, but lower than previously estimated in the younger groups. ADNC was present in fewer than 8% of those aged 65-69, jumping to 65.2% in patients over the age of 90.

First thing in the morning, I attended an appointment at my local hospital for investigation of a tinnitus I have experienced since the death of Meg. The results are more or less what I suspected and I was given an explanatory leaflet which confirmed something I had read about i.e. that tinntus can be triggered by an extreme emotional event such as a bereavement. Having said that, I gain the impression that it has abated sonewhat in the last month or perhaps my brain had learned to lve with it. I am being offered a futher referral to the ENT department where they will pronbably do a scan – this s often done and the results, so I am told, often come back negative but I will probably wait to wait a couple of months for an appointment. One the way home, I did a minimal shop up leaving the perishable items until after the Yorkshire trip but the car started to give me an unwelcome message that there was an engine malfunction and the car needed to be checked over. Now this could be either serious or trivial but I have the car booked in for an investigation of this and a sticking wing mirror but not until New Year’s Eve which was the eraliest appointment on offer. So I shall probably confine myself to little ‘toddle around’ trips and not undertake journeys of any length. In the late afternoon, I did the majority of my packing ensuring that I am taking my medicaments with me on this occasion as I forgot them all on my last trip up North. Later on in the evening there is a ‘Pride and Prejudice’ film broadcast from 9.00pm-11.00pm so I will probably go to bed early and watch it in bed, with the benefit of an electric blanket. In the morning, my University of Birmingham friend is going me a lift to the station. for which I am profoundly grateful and perhaps  might get up early in the morning and prepare some sandwiches and a flask of coffee to take with me. If all works as intended,  shall probably touch base with one of my nieces for a cup of tea together in the late afternoon, to which I shall look forward.

Perhaps because I was out on the carol concert the evening before yesterday, I overslept a little yesterday but I put this down to the dark mornings. But the winter solstice occurs at 3.03 on Sunday, 21st December in Birmingham (although I should be in Yorkshire at that time having lunch with my niece and her family) to which I always sort of look forward. Today is hopefully going to be a quieter day after much running around yesterday but it never puts me in a good mood if I get up a little bit later than I intended and feel that I am chasing my own tail this morning. The financial news this morning is that the inflation rate dropped by a smidgeon more than was expected when the ONS announced the figures recently but at 3.2% the rate is still higher than the Eurozone at 2.2%. The reason seemed to be lower food price rises but often food prices maintain an upward trend just before Christmas as I suspect that supermarkets know that most customers are prepared to spend a little bit extra at this time of year. Speculation is also now rife than another interest rate cut is in prospect which although minute (of the order of 0.1%) will shave a little bit off the costs of the normal household budget. For once, I have some good political news this morning. The UK is to rejoin the European Union’s Erasmus student exchange scheme, according to reports. The popular programme allowed Britons to spend a year studying at European universities as part of their degree, without paying extra fees, and vice versa for their European counterparts. It ended for British students after Brexit on 1 January 2021 and was replaced by the Turing scheme, but ministers could announce the UK will rejoin Erasmus from January 2027. It so happened that the Erasmus programme played a significant part in both my own and also Meg’s life as through it we acquired some significant students who went on to become life-long friends. Also, because of the exchange relationship that De Montfort University had with the Complutense University in Madrid, this enabled me to go and spend a term teaching Information Technology to public administration students in that university. The amounts of money spent on the Erasmus programme were pitifully small compared with agricultural subsidies in place at the time. I seem to remember that the amounts of money to be claimed by students to help with travel  and accommodation costs was only of the order of £2,000 and of course there was a lot of bureaucracy and form-filling involved. But I always felt that withdrawing from the Erasmus programme (and replacing it with the ‘Turing’ programme) was rather a vindictive and unnecessary part of the anti-European sentiment which swept over the country in those Brexit days. I have to admit that the scheme was a little unbalanced as far more students who had studied English as their second language in their European universities wanted to come to the UK (to further improve their English) whilst there never an equal number of UK students proficient in a European language who went to a European university. 

I gave myself a quiet morning this morning and just engaged in a bit of computer work before I had a quick lunch and then ventured out to a hardware store in the afternoon. I managed to buy one of the five things on my list but that is about par for the course as the shops seem to be full of Christmas flotsam-and-jetsam but the essential things for which you are constantly looking can never be found. Eventually, I found what I was looking for but was confused because the store stocked the same items in two different places (normal place plus Christmas stuff I suppose). Earlier in the afternoon, I received a text from one of my nieces and we have set up a rendezvous in a bar opposite the hotel in which I am lodged for Saturday afternoon so this is something to which to look forward. I need to have an early night tonight because I have to be up really early tomorrow morning to get to a local hospital for a routine test but, even at the that time in the morning the traffic will be horrendous and parking at the hospital is always problematic as well. I decided to leave my Christmas food shopping until late on Thursday afternoon as I do not fancy leaving it until literally a day or so before Christmas. Last night after a telephone call to a friend, I watched the second half of the first of a series of films on ‘Mozartiana’ broadcast by Sky Arts at 9.00pm each evening this week. From this I learned the following – as a result of her pregnancy, Mozart’s wife Constanza had considerably swollen ankles and Mozart engaged the service of a friend to find her a ground floor flat in Vienna. In return for his good offices, the friend who was a local choirmaster, asked Mozart to compose a little something for his assistance and the result was one of the most magnificent and tender works ‘Ave Verum Corpus’ (‘Behold the Body of Christ’ when taken down from the cross, a frequent subject in religious art)! Tonight, the programme is going to focus on Mozart’s sister who in her early yeas was almost as good a musician as her brother but who, almost inevitably, has been overshadowed. At this time of year, I always have similar feelings as our ancient ancestors found a way to bring light, heat and feasting into the very darkest days of the winter just around the winter solstice and early Christianity latched onto this festival and built the Christmas story around it. But in the Koran, for example, there is still the Christmas story but Mary goes out and gives birth under a palm tree (without the attendance of shepherd, kings, angels and so on) In fact, Meg and I bought a very beautiful and stylised sort of vertical crib when we visited the cathedral shop in Chester cathedral. This I bring out and display in one corner of our lounge and when suitably lit, it does indeed look as though the figures are sheltering under a palm tree. I enjoy showing this to visitors to the house, e.g. the carers who attended the little Christmas party which was about ten days ago now

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.