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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is a huge domestic political row going on at the moment, centering around Nigel Farage the Reform party leader. He was a pupil at Dulwich College in London some 49 years ago and several former pupils and masters have all testified to the claim that Farage engaged in antisemitic and racist attitudes whilst he was a pupil aged 16-18 years. These allegations have been rumbling around for a long time but have recently been resurrected and amplified by a recent article in ‘The Guardian‘ Farage and other Reform members have hit back strongly and Farage himself is claiming that there was a certain amount of schoolboy banter but no malicious intent. Farage is directing his anger against the BBC but the allegations have received prominence in all of the media, including Sky News against whom Farage does not direct any anger. There is an evident problem in raising allegations of behaviour and conduct made whilst still a teenager about half a century earlier. On the other hand, it is unlikely that the large number of allegations are all made up or the result of a false memory syndrome – as it is possible that Farage could become our next Prime Minister, then it is natural that his background receives this level of scrutiny. One suspects that this story will only run and run and with the Reform party surging in the polls, there is an evident desire from both the Tory and the Labour party to puncture the mystique that Farage has built around himself. Later on today, I need to hit the road to do some shopping for party food for tomorrow’s party and will see what stores like Lidl have to offer. Listening to ClassicFM this story, there as a rendition of ‘O Tannenbaum’, which literally translates to ‘Oh! fir tree’ from the original German but this tune is popularly known as ‘Oh! Christmas tree’ It just so happens that this this tune is also used as the musical accompaniment to the left-wing campaigning song ‘The Red Flag’ the opening lines of which are ‘The peoples flag is deepest red, It shrouded oft our martyred dead, And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold, Their hearts blood dyed its every fold.’ Now when I was transporting my son around to his various nursery schools before he attended his primary school in Leicestershire, I used to sing to him in the car and this was one of the songs to which he was exposed. I can only imagine the horror on the face of the primary school headmaster when the tune was played and my son started singing ‘The Red Flag’ The headmaster hastened to correct him that this was the tune to ‘Oh! Christmas tree’ but, of course, each was correct in his own way. Sometimes, as a family joke, I tell people about the words of the first popular song to which I was exposed was ‘Giddy Up a ding dong, Giddy up’ and a video of this being played is still available on YouTube and I think the recording was made in 1956. It is incredibly funny to think this was once part of popular culture but well worth a watch for a giggle. Mind you, I still remember ‘Que será, que sera’ (‘What will be, will be’) from that era because in 1956 our family were due to be split up whilst my mother trained to be a teacher in Newcastle, I was lodged in a boarding school in Bolton, Lancashire and my sister went to school in York whilst my grandmother stayed behind in Harrogate – so none of us knew at that time what the future held in store for us.

In the morning, I texted my nonogerian ex-chorister friend to see if she was available for coffee as we had missed each other during the week. She informed me that she had been in hospital and was now having to weeks of respite care in, I imagine, our local community hospital. Naturally, I wished her well and gave her my best wishes for her very fullest recovery, hopefully in time to enjoy the Christmas festivities. I was on the point of going out to coincide (hopefully) with acquaintances in another coffee establishment when my Droitwich friend phoned from a hotel bedroom in Milton Keynes. She had been staying there overnight after visiting work colleagues in London and then was then expecting a lift back to Birmingham International where she had left her car. We chatted about all kinds of things, some of them health related others being family related (having some little sadnesses to share with each other) and after this long and uplifting chat, I set out onto the road I what was to prove to be a very long morning. First I popped into Wetherspoons and made a hurried contact with ‘Seasoned World Traveller’ who I thought might be there but he was busy on his laptop and I was on a 30 minute car parking ticket so neither of us could tarry. Then I went to Lidl to do a major ‘party food’ shop in time for the carers’ party the next day. I rather imagined that at this time of year, there might have been a special ‘party organisers’ section of the store complete with the appropriate food but I finished off just buying bits and pieces from the various parts of the store. I have a selection of savoury items some sweet things to finish off and a selection of beers, wines, ciders and soft drinks. As last year, I may have bought too much but I am sure that over the festive season, it will all get consumed. Then I popped into a neighbouring store in order to buy some tinsel but was amazed to be told that it had all sold out apart from one blue strand which I nonetheless purchased. Then I visited yet another neighbouring store, still in search of tinsel and did end up buying some more coffee and ‘CoffeeMate’ (powdered milk powder) which is always useful.  In the second store along, I did buy some of these long thin calendars which I keep in the kitchen and the bedroom to keep forthcoming dates on view. When I returned home, pretty exhausted by now, I was delighted to see someone (and I really do not know who, but it must be a church friend) had come along in my absence and affixed a couple of Christmas wreathes to the relevant nails in our porch. This was so good of them but I must find out who had committed the good deed and, indeed, pay for them.

So I cannot recall ever being quite so ready for Christmas as I happen to be this year. We now have our ‘main’ Christmas tree which stands in the corner of our Hall and greets visitors to the house the minute they walk through the door whilst my little fibre optic tree gets lit when we have visitors to our main Lounge. I have three little cribs in place, one in each Lounge and one in the dining room – all I want now is for some visitors to the house to which to show them. I have also started to think about the Christmas card list which is automated to the extent that I have all of the addresses on a computer file and the trickiest thing to do is to get the labels printed out. I did a quick search to see if I have any Christmas cards in stock which  do but I still need to buy to some ‘good’ ones (with a religious theme) to send out to family. I find that when I am engaged in this task, I send religious cards only to those who would value and appreciate them whilst I like to have an ‘internationalist’ set of cards for those of a cosmopolitan but non-religious persuasion. I suspect that I may already be too late for the theoretical last posting date for Spain which could a date in late November but I will concentrate on getting my international cards into the system as soon as I am capable. One of the Christmas traditions was always working as a ‘temp’ as a Christmas postman in the days when the costs of postage were quite low and the volume of Christmas cards correspondingly high. I worked on the post in Harrogate when I was only about 16-17 and then worked on the post in both Manchester and in Leeds. Meg in her youth certainly worked on the post in Stafford and she used to tell me graphic stories about her vain attempts to deliver a rapidly decaying goose. The particular challenges to us in those days was trying to get calendars delivered through incredibly small and tight letter boxes in the older parts of town and, occasionally, there were yapping dogs that seized cards out of one’s hands the minute they got pushed through the door. I actually got quite used to working on Christmas Day as well but after a day with one’s family, I started work washing dishes in one of the large hotels at about 6.00 in the evening and we did not have a TV in those days so  I was not missing very much. Some people go a little mad decorating the outsides of their houses with  variety of flashing lights but I must confess to not going this far bit I generally, with the assistance of friends down the road, invest in a couple of Christmas wreaths for the outside of the house. When  I am out on the road in the next few days, I am under strict instructions from our domestic help to complement a few of our Christmas decorations with some tinsel of similar red-green hue and not to mix up styles by suddenly introducing extraneous colours.

When I eventually got down into town later on the morning, I wandered into one or two of the charity ships wondering if they had any brass candle holders or even tea light holders because I have in mind to deploy in the little memorial to Meg which I have in the Music Lounge. At the moment, Meg’s ashes are in a box covered by a tasteful red plush covering cloth with Meg’s photograph surmounting it and a little rosebud or similar in  a delicate little vase immediately in front of it. I am unsure of there is a term that covers this sort of arrangement but an American term is a ‘columbarium’ which actually refers to a whole building or structure designed to hold the ashes of lots of individuals.  I am not going to use this term as nobody will know what I am talking about so will just refer to it as Meg’s little memorial when friends or visitors call around. Actually, I did find in a charity shop a couple of German made tea light holders which were sold to me for £1.50 the pair and which are just on the right side of being too ornate for the purpose – I suspect that they were intended as table decorations in the first instance but they will serve my purpose quite well. I happen to have a good supply of tea lights in stock from when the Eucharistic minister used to call around and we lit a couple of candles before conducting the mini-service. Once I had all of the decorations in place, I was overwhelmed by some minutes of sadness because if Meg had been alive I would have wheeled her around so that she could admire and take pleasure in all of the decorations so the feelings of loss became immense. I made my way to the ‘Gifts of Love’ cafe where they know me quite well and in fact express some concern if for any reason I do not turn up on a Friday morning (it is nice to be missed) and generally get greeted by a hug anyway. Another lady well known to the proprietor came in and generously bought £20.00 of raffle tickets the proceeds being used to finance the welfare of abandoned horses and donkeys. So I bought £5 of tickets as they treat me so well and the coffee and cake that I have are well below the prices charged by the commercial establishments which are dotted along the High Street. Then I came home and cooked myself a dinner of risotto remains of the risotto from a few days back with a goodly serving of broccoli. The weather was intensely gloomy today and at 3.00pm in the afternoon it was practically completely dark but only just over of weeks now before the days start to lengthen again. During the day I had a brief conversation with my Droitwich friend who was down in London for a works Christmas party ad she seems to have had a good time but I am not quite sure what day and time she is actually returning. Tomorrow is going to be dominated by the buying of party food for Sunday’s party – I am leaving this to the last moment so that it does not ‘go off’ by being purchased too early.

I woke up at just after 6.00am and wondered whether to get up or to stay in bed. Actually just a few minutes more in bed proved to be the best part of an hour so I got up a bit later than intended. The evening before, I treated myself to the last of the Alice Robert’s programmes how the human species gradually came to inhabit the globe and the routes that they may have taken. This last programme looked at the arrival of homo sapiens in the Americas and we know from the fossil evidence that what is now Canada might have been the first point of entry. But a mystery prevails because at the time when the fossil evidence indicates, approximately 13,000 years BC,  the continent was covered by a massive ice sheet. But then a land bridge may have developed allowing (in archaeological terms) a brief period of time in which early modern humans could have entered the Americas and then progressed along the coast all the length of the Americas, eventually ending up in Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America. But even this is a contended history because gradually other bits of evidence are accumulating which together with some statistical modelling suggests that the earliest inhabitants might have arrived in the Americas by sea some 30,000 years ago. Both the science and the archaeological evidence are evolving and, of course, there is an enormous amount of conjecture involved. The evidence is not just fossil evidence but several branches of science converging. A recent Oxford University study has put forward the conjecture that when the timeline for humans was compared with dates obtained for extinct animals, the analysis showed human expansion, during this warmer period, happened at broadly the same time as their disappearance.  The team suggests an increase in human population seems to be linked to a significant impact on the catastrophic decline of these large megafauna. No doubt, these debates will continue for many years yet to come and what has to be remembered is both the shape of the continents so many millennia ago as well as the prevailing climate change. So we are left with the two rival explanations of the arrival of the first early humans from Eurasia, the dominant one being a route through a land bride along coastal shores some 13,000 years ago and the new rival explanation seems to be arrival by sea some 30,000 years ago. The two approaches are not exactly incompatible with each other, because it could be that the arrival of humans some 30,000 years ago represents a failed colonisation with no trace in the genetic or the fossil record.

Now returning to modern times, preparations for Christmas seem to be well underway as one can see Christmas decorations starting to appear in houses along our streets. My domestic help turned up and she really loves putting up and decorating Christmas trees! So we had to move some of our hall furniture and then got the tree erected and decorated with its lights but the baubles can come a bit later. So now I can get somewhat into the Christmas spirit. I decided not to go to Tai Chi this morning so that I could assist our domestic help with Christmas decorations. Christmas without Meg is always going to be a bit of a ‘bitter-sweet’ affair this year but life, as they say, is for the living although, almost inevitably, one thinks of family, friends and acquaintances who are no longer with us. Although I had missed my Tai Chi session, I still hoped that could coincide with my ex-banker friend so I raced along and managed to catch him at the end of the class – we indulged ourselves with coffee, chocolate cake and stories about our respective mothers-in-law. So I was glad to have this little chat so  called in to collect my newspaper and when I got back home, our domestic help was still there. Now the Christmas tree was all hung with its appropriate baubles and some tasteful bits of decoration put around the hall. Some days ago and thinking ahead to our party on Sunday, I had ordered some ‘mistletoe by post’ and, as it happens, it is grown an a local farm in Worcestershire where it is cultivated on old apple trees. So now the main decorations were put up I took the opportunity to put some strategic sprigs of mistletoe to hang from our lights in both the hall and the Music Lounge. The UK tradition of kissing under the mistletoe is thought to have started in the 1700s, but it became much more popular throughout the 1800s. The Victorians especially became big fans of kissing under the plant – and it’s stuck ever since! The reason there isn’t one clear explanation why we kiss underneath mistletoe is because the plant has been linked to many stories and traditions over hundreds of years, and different people see it in different ways. One of the more common meanings is that mistletoe is seen as a symbol of fertility and life – and that this could be why we kiss underneath it. There are four more bits of Christmassy things to be done but I think they are best done in the daylight. We have a total of three cribs (Nativity scenes) one of them made in balsa wood in Indonesia, another which looks like a traditional German design and the third  is much more tasteful rendition of the nativity scene Meg and I spotted in Chester Cathedral shop and immediately fell into love with it. When lit in a particular way, it looks as though the Nativity scene is set under a palm tree (which is where in the Koran,  Mary is represented as giving birth) Finally I have a small fibre optic Christmas tree which adorns a corner pf our Main Lounge and which we have had for decades now but the fibre optic lights coming from the ends of the ‘leaves’ constantly change colour so it is quite a fascinating little object. I always used to dash around putting the least amount of decoration up on the grounds that you less you put up, the easier it is to clear away but in view of our party and the fact my son and daughter-in-law are spending Christmas with me, I thought I would make a little more effort this year. I am not sure how many Christmas celebrations will be evident this year as one of our friends has moved away, another is having an operation whilst our immediate neighbours may well still be away in India on holiday.