The evening before yesterday was the day upon which the induction of our new parish priest was due to take place. I set off for the church in plenty of time but the church car park was actually being reserved for the numerous fellow clergy who were due to attend so I was directed to park in the adjacent school playground which had been pressed into service as an overflow car park. The service was beautifully constructed and I could not help thinking was put together so much better than the previous one about three yeas ago. It was quite a poignant night for me in the church and I could not help thinking that Meg would have loved every minute of it. Then we came to the function held afterwards in a local pub. Having equipped myself with a pint of John Smiths bitter and then a plateful of food, I originally sat down with a Geordie parishioner who I know quite well and chatted with the people on the same table before I took the opportunity to ‘circulate’ around the room and have chats with some people that I knew. All in all, I had a wonderful evening and I took the opportunity to give one or two selected people who had known Meg a copy of the funeral eulogy which was actually a very good summary of her life and achievements. Towards the end of the evening, I made contact with a priest who was the brother of one of the leading lights of our parish but whose parish is normally in Lancashire except when he has occasionally been called upon to be a ‘relief’ priest in the case of vacations. This priest has an enormously warm and engaging personality and every parishioner who has come into contact with him has felt enriched by the experience. I reminded him that years before we had asked him to perform a blessing over the ‘Virgin of Guadeloupe’ medallion given to Meg by our son’s Mexican family and worn every single day until (and including) the day of her death and now in the safe possession of a niece in Yorkshire. I think the priest was quite touched to be reminded of this and had some wonderful consoling words for me So the function broke up at 11.00pm and I was the last car in the car park and so was relieved not to get locked in but the night held some very special memories for me. A special booklet for the ‘Order of Service’ had been produced and this contained some fascinating facts about the history of the church. For example, I knew that Edward Elgar had visited the church but had not appreciated that he was a frequent visitor and played the organ in the church whenever he visited. I must say that it was quite a heartwarming experience to be felt to be part of a larger community but with the inevitable facts of biology playing out, there were several widows present in the congregation but I think I was the only evident widower. As the night had been so late (for me) and the weather sharply colder this morning, I allowed myself the luxury (necessity?) of staying for an extra hour in bed in the morning. After I had a leisurely breakfast and a good read of yesterday’s newspapers, I set off down the hill by car and then walked along the High Street to my favourite charity shop-cum-cafe to which it is my habit to repair in Friday morning. There I had some coffee and had some delicious moist apple-and-sultana cake. Being a charity, they have some supporters who cook a range of cakes which they then sell in the cafe to assist in their fundraising. After that, I took the opportunity to get some money out of a nearby ATM and returned home. After last night’s feasting, I did not feel particularly hungry but had a meal of mackerel fillets on salad leaves which was more than sufficient for me. It seemed quite a fine bright afternoon so I resolved to do the second last grass cut of the season. This went as planned but the grass seemed pretty thick to me on this occasion and I was fortunate in that I had just finished and was cleaning up the mower, when the skies darkened and it started to spot with rain so I had just completed my task in time.  

I could not believe my eyes when I saw what Donald Trump has been doing to the White House. After denying that he was going to alter the existing structure, the whole of the historic East Wing has been demolished or will be in a day or so.  Trump denied that he was going to do this but has now gone ahead and the destruction, along with some historic trees, is practically complete. As roaring machinery tore down one side of the White House, President Trump acknowledged on Wednesday that he was having the entire East Wing demolished to make way for his 90,000-square-foot ballroom, a striking expansion of a project that is remaking the profile of one of the nation’s most iconic buildings. Mr. Trump was unsentimental as news of the demolition spread. ‘It was never thought of as being much,’ he said of the East Wing, which was home to the first lady’s office and spaces used for ceremonial purposes. ‘It was a very small building.’ The process of tearing down the East Wing was expected to be completed as soon as this weekend, two senior administration officials said, as Mr. Trump moved rapidly to carry out a passion project that he said was necessary to host state dinners and other events. But the previously unannounced decision to demolish the East Wing was at odds with Mr. Trump’s previous statements about the project, and underscored his intention to blast through the sensibilities of many in Washington to continue putting a lasting imprint on the White House. The president also said on Wednesday that the ballroom would cost $300 million, $100 million more than initially estimated. ‘In order to do it properly, we had to take down the existing structure,’ Mr. Trump said. He also said — somewhat cryptically — that certain areas are being left. But the two senior administration officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the plans, confirmed that the entire East Wing was being demolished. The West Wing and the White House residence, where the president lives, are not affected by the project, which is the largest renovation to the White House in decades. According to computer-generated impression of what the new ballroom will look like, it will completely dwarf he West Wing in scale and make the whole architecture of the White House completely unbalanced. Now renovations and alterations have been done by past presidents but the size and scale of this latest venture is completely unprecedented. Certain sections of conservative (not MAGA-land ) members of the American public are privately appalled but Trump being a law unto himself has sought no approval or expert view. If I were the next president, I would

I awoke this morning after a little nightmare of the type that makes you feel glad to wake up and realise that it was not real. My dream upon awakening combined two familiar elements in my present and past life. I was on a train and could not find my ticket amidst all of the other out-of-date tickets which I as carrying in my wallet. Then my travelling companion who was a colleague with whom I team taught a course enquired whether I had marked all of the student assignments ready to hand back to the students at the end of our journey – needless to say, he had done his quota but I had not marked mine which only added to my distress. Perhaps it was because I have a busy day in front of me that I had this sort of nightmare but when I do have dreams of this sort, it is nearly always looking frantically (and never finding!) something I had lost and badly needed.

A massive domestic political row is taking place over the ‘grooming gangs’ enquiry which is getting off to the trickiest of starts. All survivors who have resigned from the government’s grooming gangs inquiry panel will consider returning if safeguarding minister Jess Phillips resigns.  The four women who have resigned this week have written to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, calling for Ms Phillips to step down and all survivors to be consulted on appointing a senior judge as chair with no major conflicts of interest. Ms Phillips told parliament on Tuesday suggestions the scope of the inquiry was to be expanded from just grooming gangs were ‘categorically untrue’. But leaked consultation documents and texts between the safeguarding minister and survivor Fiona Goddard show the survivors’ concerns that the scope would be expanded were valid. The survivors’ letter says: ‘Being publicly contradicted and dismissed by a government minister when you are a survivor telling the truth takes you right back to that feeling of not being believed all over again. It is a betrayal that has destroyed what little trust remained.’ The survivors have demanded the scope of the inquiry remain ‘laser-focused’ on grooming gangs and called for victims to be free to speak to support networks without fear of reprisal. An independent mental health professional should replace the current victim liaison lead, they also wrote. The letter to Ms Mahmood says: “Her [Ms Phillips’] conduct over the last week has shown she is unfit to oversee a process that requires survivors to trust the government. Her departure would signal you are serious about accountability and changing direction. The survivors describe their demands as ‘the absolute bare minimum for survivors to trust that this inquiry will be different from every other process that has let us down’. Now it very difficult to really know what is going on here because I have had, and still have, the highest regard for Jess Phillips, who has devoted practically the whole of her political life to highlighting the lot of abused women and children and for whom these accusations sound completely out of character. It could be that Jess Phillips has been ‘bounced’ by Home Office officials who want the whole affair to quietly go away or its impact to be minimised. Trying to get some background to this story, I eventually found a long account in the (right wing) ‘Spectator’ magazine which appeared, on the surface at least, to have a good handle on what was going on. The article starts off with the reaction of Jess Phillips when she was informing the House of Commons about the government’s view of the whole scandal. If Ms Phillips’s spoken words confirmed her government’s fundamental lack of interest in grappling with the ‘grooming gangs’ scourge, her noiseless irritation upon hearing other MPs speak candidly about those gangs exposed something darker.  If the government cannot see how awful these optics are, how infuriating the sight of huffing ministers will be to the vast majority of Brits, then it must be even more lost than I thought. Finally Phillips responded to Lam. ‘I think it’s a shame that [Lam] only referred to one sort of child-abuse victim’, she said. Because when it comes to this vile crime, there ‘should be no hierarchy’ of victims. What incalculable gall. Jess, that is precisely the point Lam and others are making: that white working-class girls were not only savagely abused by gangs of men but also ruthlessly demoted down the ‘hierarchy of victimhood’ by a political class that cares virtually nothing for them and the Spectator concluded by saying ‘Don’t huff – it’s the truth.’

I was just getting to leave the house to do my Tai Chi class this morning when my Droitwich friend, recently returned from South Africa, phoned to ask she could drop by for a coffee. I knew that I was going to have a tight turn around after Tai Chi to be at home for.my chiropodist’s appointment so I decided to forego Tai Chi for one week so that I could have a snatched coffee with my friend. Afterwards, it was time to go shopping but next week promises to be a fairly light week as I am stocked up on a lot of the usual items and so  decided to whizz around  the local Aldi which might be quicker than the alternative. Once I returned home and unpacked the shopping, I made myself a light lunch and looked forward to my son calling around as he indicated in a text message that he would. We chatted over things domestic, family-related and political before he had to leave. In the evening there is going to be a special church service in which our new parish priest is due to be ‘inducted’ in his new role and afterwards there is to be a social event in a nearby pub to which all of the parish are invited. I imagine that tonight might be teeming so I intend to leave in plenty of time to ensure that I secure a parking place and the social event may prove to be interesting as well. It may be that there are people that I know vaguely by sight and knew Meg and myself as a couple. So I have prepared my little script for when people enquire as to the status of Meg’s health and how the news and circumstances of her death are communicated to the people that I may well meet.

We now know that the inflation rate, published yesterday, has come in at a figure of 3.8% and not hit 4.0% as some had predicted. This fact alone will save the government quite a lot pf money as a whole range of benefits are linked, by law, to the inflation rate for September (published in October) of the previous year. But what the government has gained on the roundabouts, it may have lost on the swings as it were as the retirement pension, subject to the triple lock, will now rise by 4.8% which mirrors the recent growth in incomes. Since the introduction of the triple lock in 2011, the value of the state pension has risen much faster than either average earnings or prices. At £241 per week, a full new state pension is expected to be £30 per week (14%) higher than it would have been under average earnings indexation since 2011. According to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the triple lock has pushed up spending on the state pension so that it now (2025–26) costs the government £12 billion more per year than the cost would have been if the state pension would have been uprated in line with average earnings since 2011.  On the domestic front, our domestic help called around in the morning as she had attended a funeral on her usual day. We exchanged our usual round of domestic and family-related news with each other as we always do. I was feeling pretty tired in the morning having got up so early to go the airport the day before, so am enjoying a quieter day. I had spent some time the previous evening reminding myself how I could protect a file which had posted onto one of my websites. I know of this fantastic piece of software which encrypts the whole of one’s file with a password and encodes the password repeatedly into the encrypted file, working in an extremely clever way. So the password is not stored anywhere and if you ever forget it and do not have access to the original, then you are stuck for ever.

The conflict in the Ukraine seems to be going nowhere fast, A one stage, it looked as though Trump was losing patience with Putin but Trump blows hot and cold at the drop of a hat and now seems to be swinging firmly behind Russia. Donald Trump has said he did not want a wasted meeting after a plan to have face-to-face talks with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin about the war in Ukraine were put on hold. The US president indicated that a key sticking point remained Moscow’s refusal to cease fighting along the current front line, in remarks at the White House on Tuesday. Earlier, a White House official had said there were no plan for a Trump-Putin meeting in the immediate future, after Trump said on Thursday that the two would hold talks in Budapest within two weeks. Key differences between US and Russian proposals for peace became increasingly clear this week, appearing to have dashed chances of a summit. To most observers, Putin now seems to be playing Trump and has apparently made no concessions of any kind. The latest madness in which Trump is engaged is to demolish part of the East Wing of the White house in order to make space for a huge ballroom, Mar-a-Lago style (i.e. gaudy and tasteless) In so doing, the Rose Garden established by Jacqueline Kennedy has been paved over in what appears to be an act of pure vandalism. It seems that Trump may be within his rights to do such a thing but nobody has been able to ascertain who will pay the thousands, if not millions, of dollars to carry out the work. Trump is saying that the work will be funded by ‘patriots’ but, like so much else, appears murky in the extreme. Presidents have remodelled parts of the White House in the past but the East wing, by tradition, is regarded as the province of the ‘First Lady’ but it is being said that Melania Trump has spent less than 14 days in the White House since last January and therefore, one supposes, could not care less about what is going on in the East Wing. It seems she spends. a fair amount of time in Trump Tower in New York but, apart from contacting Putin over the state of the kidnapped Ukrainian children seems to keep well out of her husband’s way unless it is absolutely necessary that they be seen together.

In the morning, I was still feeling pretty tired after the really early start of yesterday and so busied myself with a computer task which was to locate the files which tell me the location of each of my ‘domestic’ files within the study. Since I turned the study around last April, this system has worked extremely well for me but I still needed to know the location of my index files. For some reason, the ‘Finder’ app on my Apple Mac does not seem to play ball but with a combination of some inspired guesswork, I managed to find out where my files were. But it took me the best morning of the morning to accomplish this task after a degree of frustration. In the very late morning, I went down by car to pick up my newspaper and then returned home to have a ‘quickie’ but healthy lunch of a tin of tuna on some salad leaves. Today is the day when our domestic rubbish bins go out and fortunately, I remembered, just in time, that I needed to label my bin with my newly acquired wheelie bin number, acquired last week. In the late afternoon, I composed a long text to one of my friends and wanted to correct a word with a typo in it and succeeded in deleting the whole lot of it. On a computer, you can always press ‘Ctrl Z’ to effect an undo of the last action and I have just consulted Google to see what is done on a smart phone. The answer is the equivalent of ‘undo’ while texting is, according to Google, to use a two-finger swipe left on the keyboard to undo recent text or shake your iPhone to bring up the undo typing option. To redo, swipe right on the keyboard with two fingers or shake again. This I must experiment with to make sure the problem does not happen again.

The day before yesterday, I spent some time printing out the two long documents being the ‘Letter from Madrid’ followed by the ‘Letter from Jakarta’ which I had written decades before. On one occasion the printer jammed but I am fairly used to this happening on occasion and I have some techniques for the removal of paper jammed inside. But although it seems to function correctly, a red warning light now seems to be permanently stuck on, for a reason that I cannot discern. It could be that the printer is now some 15 years old and nearing the end of its life and the machine s trying to tell me something but I will press on as long as I can and I still have adequate supplies of toner for it. Yesterday, there was a major internet outage as an Amazon web server located in North America had developed a fault and the problem rapidly escalated with, at one point in the morning, banks, airlines and even HMRC affected by the outage. This had me very concerned because my Droitwich friend was flying back from South Africa after the extended stay she has had with her family and I feared that the South African airport and the airline itself might be caught up in the wash, as it were. My texts did seem to be delayed in being delivered but I was very relieved to be informed that she was on her flight and seemed to have taken off on time. I have been asked to pick her up from the airport which I will willingly do but everything will still be dark at the time she is scheduled to arrive and picking up at Birmingham airport is always a bit nightmarish – still, I am sure that we will manage. I did not sleep particularly well during the night but got up before 5.00am and left the house just before 6.00am as my friend’s flight was scheduled to arrive at 6.40am. The roads to the airport were not particularly busy but I got to the airport in plenty pf time and loitered for a little in the ‘drop of’ lane where I ought not to have been to while away some minutes. Then I entered the premium zone for picking up passengers (£6 for the first 15 minutes), made my way to the entrance/exit of the arrivals hall and then my friend and I pinged texts to each other until we eventually met up and got on our way. By this time, it was starting to get light and the weather was not raining so we went straight to her house in Droitwich to have a welcome cup of coffee and an exchange of all of our news. Then my friend set to work straight away (as so much of her work is done online and at home) and I made my way back to Bromsgrove, eventually making contact with my two ‘Tuesday morning’ coffee friends and we enjoyed a coffee and a toasted teacake together. Whilst I was on the High Street, I took the opportunity to purchase a good quality (‘Van Heusen’) shirt from a charity shop which happened to be just my size. I always examine the collar and cuffs well in shirts that I buy like this and being a good quality make, it even had spare buttons supplied with it, as well as a breast pocket which many shirts do not have these days, perhaps as a cost-cutting measure.  Then I got home, collected my thoughts a little and then went down to do my Pilates session for the week although, in all honesty I was feeling pretty exhausted by this time with having slept so little the night before. After I returned home, I finished off some curry I had in the fridge and then dozed whilst watching some of the liberal American media political websites railing against Trump and the MAGA crowd.

The attention of many financial commentators, as well as pensioners themselves will be fixed on the inflation rate due to be announced tomorrow. Inflation is tipped to come in at its highest level since January last year on Wednesday morning. A 4% figure is expected to be revealed by the Office for National Statistics- up from the current 3.8% rate. Inflation measures the pace of price shifts across different sectors of the economy on a rolling 12-month basis. Those shifts are then used to create a headline figure. The increase in the consumer prices index measure this time, economists say, is likely to have been driven by fuel prices rising last month when they fell sharply during September 2024. Other factors may include rising prices for second-hand cars. The UK state pension is expected to rise by 4.8% from April 2026, driven by average earnings growth. This increase is based on the triple lock mechanism, which uses the highest of CPI inflation, average earnings growth, or 2.5%. As September’s inflation figures are not yet available, the 4.8% average earnings growth figure is the likely basis for the rise. The Average earnings growth (including bonuses) for May to July was revised up to 4.8%. The so-called ‘Triple Lock’ will be used in the calculations. The state pension increases by the highest of three measures: the September CPI inflation figure, average earnings growth (May-July), or 2.5%. A 4.8% increase could take the full new state pension above the income tax personal allowance of £12,570 for the first time, meaning some pensioners may have to pay income tax. Now there are a couple of things that need to be noted about the rise in pensioner incomes over the past decade or so. It is undoubtedly true that the triple lock has helped to improve the lot of pensioners as a group to the point at which the rise in their income has proceeded at a faster rate than the rise of public sector incomes as a whole. But politically, the triple lock is proving to be very hard to either abandon or to modify – the elderly are the biggest source of support for the Tory party so they will always look after their own. Similarly, after the ‘winter fuel’ debacle, the Labour party does not have the elderly in its sights (although expensive cars may be removed from the ‘Blue Badge’ scheme) However, the Labour government could decide to honour the rate of increase for next Spring but to alter the rate for subsequent years by taking, for example, the average of the three measures or only basing their calculations on the second highest figure. I would be amazed if the Labour Party did not attempt a reform like this in their November budget. I suspect that when the definitive economic history of the past decade or so comes to be written, it will be documented that quite large transfers of wealth took place when more affluent pensioners help to draw the sting of university fees or to help their grandchildren with a deposit for their first home.

So, I awake this morning to another really dark and gloomy day. According to the BBC’s weather information, we are due to have a thundery and showery day today with rain persisting all day until about 8.00pm in the evening. So, this means that whatever else I do today, like putting petrol in the car, I shall avoid my daily walk and getting thoroughly soaked but do everything that I need to do by car. As I surveyed the international news yesterday, I was amazed not to say disappointed, at how little attention is being paid in the British media to what is happening in the USA at the moment. There is a huge anti-Trump so-called ‘No Kings’ opposition movement to the creeping authoritarianism which is so much a feature of current USA politics. The term ‘No Kings’ derives from an artificially generally image in which Trump allowed himself to be depicted as a king complete with crown. King George III was the British monarch who lost the American colonies during the American Revolutionary War. He reigned from 1760 to 1820, a period during which the thirteen American colonies declared independence and won their freedom from British rule. So the ‘No Kings’ movement derives its name from the period when the Americans felt themselves to be governed from afar with no democratic rights. The ‘No Kings’ movement had organised anti-Trump rallies across many cities the length and breadth of the United States and the number of demonstrators is in the hundreds of thousands if not millions and is said to be the largest protest in American political history (but not regarded as newsworthy in the UK!) Trump and his supporters have responded by allowing an AI generated image to be broadcast in which Trump, naturally wearing a crown, is flying a fighter aircraft, ‘Top Gun’ style, over the demonstrating crows dropping huge balls of what the BC quaintly calls brown sludge (but it is obviously intended to be turds of excrement) over the crowds labelling them as ‘Hate America’ rallies. The ‘No Kings’ movement are making great efforts to keep the movement completely violence-free so that Trump does not have the excuse of seizing people and whisking them away (which is what the ICE – Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are doing to anybody who looks as though they may be an undocumented migrant, even if they are full US citizens) There are serious political commentators who are arguing that the USA is on the verge of a fascist takeover and we must remind ourselves that Hitler came to power democratically before dismantling the opposition to his regime. Meanwhile, in domestic politics, it looks as though our Royal Family are in a huge effort to distance themselves from Prince Andrew practically banishing him from their midst. It now looks as it will be revealed in the Virginia Giuffre posthumous book that Andrew had sex with her on at least three occasions, treating her as some kind of sex slave and maintained contact with Epstein, the convicted sex trafficker who committed suicide in prison long after his previous denials had indicated. So, Prince Andrew is regarded, probably quite rightly, as toxic and the publicity is undermining everything for which the Royal Family stands.

As yesterday was to be quite a ‘light’ day with no particular commitments, I decided to run off the hard copy for some files. One such was easily accessible and was the two page eulogy/summary of Meg’s life and work. I have run off some extra copies of this because on Thursday evening, during the social event which follows the induction of our new parish priest, I am bound to see some parish acquaintances who will probably enquire after Meg. To those who are interested, I can give them this two-page summary which says about as much as one needs to say but I have also appended my business card so that people have my contact details should they need them. The other two documents relate to the periods that I spent abroad, on my own, one undertaking a sabbatical term at the Complutense University of Madrid and the other as a tutor on the De Montfort University MBA programme in Jakarta, Indonesia. At the time, I was in the habit of listening to Alistair Cooke’s ‘Letter from America’ which were weekly talks on American life, history and politics from 1946 – 2004 and which were broadcast each week on Radio 4. Over 58 years, this had quite a following and so when I was in Madrid, and later in Jakarta, I used to pen a few hundred words each night on the happenings of the day and some of my reflections upon them and were then sent home as ‘Carta de Madrid’ (Letter from Madrid) and later ‘Letter from Jakarta’ The ‘Letter from Madrid’ I used to post to Meg each week and she used to photocopy them and put a copy in each person’s pigeon hole (a name given to a set of open boxes in the departmental office where written communications were left for individual members of staff -the physical structure as well as the term ‘pigeon hole’ must now be redundant in this internet age) The reactions from my colleagues was interesting, so Meg told me – some members of staff read them with great interest whilst others threw them unread straight into the waste paper bin. The location of these documents took some hunting for on my computer system because the first was written some thirty-five years ago and the second thirty-one years ago. Initially these documents were hard to locate as I had put them into an archaic folder called ‘blog’ although I must have posted them there some years afterwards. Consulting the web, I discover that the term ‘blog’ was coined by shortening the term ‘weblog,’ which was created by Jorn Barger in 1997 and later, Peter Merhilz created the shorter version ‘blog’ in 1999. What I was writing was not a true blog or internet diary at the time but the folder name must have seemed appropriate to me some time later. Having located these precious files, I then went late into town by car (although the weather had brightened considerably by then), filled the car up with petrol and then had a free coffee in Waitrose before I came home to cook myself a curry lunch.

Last night, I attended church which is now the norm for early Saturday evenings. But on my way out, one of the members of the congregation just about recognised me and enquired after Meg so this triggered my usual description of how Meg had died peacefully at home surrounded by family and friends. It transpired that my fellow worshipper had worked for a large multinational company (in the transport business, of which I had heard) but she had to take early retirement a few months ago after a reorganisation of the company. We had a most pleasant chat and, if the opportunity arises which it might well later in the week, I might be able to pursue and extend our conversation. After I returned home, I had some blueberries together with some freshly prepared custard. Although I have some packets of ready-made custard in stock, it is so much cheaper to prepare it yourself and I now have the quantities and the proportions of to a fine art so that it is now no trouble to prepare it. But I do have to stand over it and constantly stir it so that it does not boil over and/or stick. I have treated myself to a beef joint which I always put in the slow cooker and then put it on as soon as I get up the following day. Once cooked, I shall divide it into about three portions and freeze two of them for future weeks which is what I do with joints of meat these days. The political news this morning is an acknowledgement about the damage Brexit has wrought on the British economy. Brexit will have a negative impact on the UK’s economic growth ‘for the foreseeable future’, the UK’s most senior banker has warned. The Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey said a decline in the UK’s potential growth rate from 2.5% to 1.5% over the past 15 years was linked to lower productivity growth, an ageing population, trade restrictions – and post-Brexit economic policies. But he did add that the economy is, however, likely to adjust and find balance again in the longer term. ‘Over the longer term, there will be – because trade adjusts – some at least partial rebalancing,’ he added.

In the week to come, there are two major events to which I can look forward. The first of these is the homecoming of my University of Droitwich friend who has been in South Africa for the past three weeks seeing her family. Both she and I know that she is going to be pretty miserable for the next few days as she has enjoyed seeing her extended family so much and has seen so much of them for the past few weeks. By now the long trek home is commencing, involving two changes of flight but after a text, I have agreed to pick her up at the airport on Tuesday morning so that she will be arriving back in the UK to a friendly face. The second major event this week is the formal induction of our new parish priest next Thursday evening. There will be a formal church service attended by some fellow ministers from other Christian denominations and in many ways, this is like a ‘rebirth’ of the parish community. Afterwards, there is going to be a reception for all of the members of the congregation and this is to be held in a large meeting room attached to a local pub which is literally a hundred yards or so away from the church. I am looking forward very much to this event as it is a chance to meet with other members of the congregation whom I got to know some years ago but have not met recently if they attend the Sunday morning rather than the Saturday evening service at the church. The last occasions in which I had a similar opportunity for meeting was at a Summer and a Christmas church ‘fête’ but a combination of COVID and then Meg’s illness and my inability to attend church rather terminated such events for me. I must remind myself to run off several more copies of the eulogy I prepared for Meg which just happens to be a good summary of her life and which will be appreciated, I am sure.

In the morning, I did not rush too much because my University of Birmingham friend could not make it for his customary coffee so I knew I was going to be on my own. The weather was all rather wet and drizzly and I wondered whether to go down to town by car. Eventually, I decided to walk down and got a little wet in the process but I reasoned that a bit of light rain did not hurt anybody so I walked down into town, had my coffee and then walked back home again. Waitrose did not have any copies of the ‘Sunday Times‘ for which I have a voucher so I knew that I would have to take the car into town to get my copy of the paper. Now started a fruitless search which involved a visit to two supermarkets and a petrol station. I was unsuccessful at each retail outlet that I had tried and I know from bitter experience that one outlet sells out, then customers like myself dash from one to another and even if copies were printed and distributed in the normal fashion, they soon go. The minute I  got home, I had to start cooking the lunch which involves quite a lot of work when I have cooked a joint in the slow cooker as it involves cleaning out the dish, making some onion gravy and dividing the joint into four smaller portions for eventual freezing. After I had eaten my lunch, I had a little doze (how unusual?) and then my son called around as we agreed that he should and we exchanged news of our comings-and-goings over the past few days. Later in the afternoon, I busied myself with some domestic jobs and wondered if anything would grab my attention in the broadcast TV schedules. Nothing grabbed my attention so I may do a search on the BBC iPlayer for some popular science programmes, probably made by Hannah Fry, Jim Al-Khalili or Brian Cox as these are generally excellent. I still have my book on ‘The Grieving Brain‘ which I am finding interesting on a second read and tend to read one or two chapters a day.

The meeting took place yesterday between Trump and the Ukrainian leader, Zelenskyy in which the use of Tomahawk missiles against Russia was discussed. Now an interesting game of poker is being played out because Trump did not agree with the request for the missiles but neither did he rule it out. It might be that the threat of the missiles being used against Putin might just be sufficient to bring him to the negotiating table so it is the imminent threat of force, rather than force itself, that might be the critical factor. One of the reasons I consult with Sky News regularly is that it seems to bring forward well researched stories and much more quickly than the BBC which I think has been cowed into submission by governments past and present. So, two stories caught my eye which I am sure have not been reported on the BBC but, if so, I must have missed them. The first story relates how the King will become the first British monarch to pray publicly with the Pope since the Reformation 500 years ago during a state visit to the Holy See next week. The King and Queen will meet the new pontiff Pope Leo XIV at the Apostolic Palace, his official residence, next Thursday during their trip to Vatican City. In a highly significant moment in relations between the Catholic Church and Church of England, of which His Majesty is Supreme Governor, the King and Queen and the Pope will attend a special ecumenical service in the Sistine Chapel celebrating the ongoing work towards unity and cooperation among different Christian churches. The decision for the King and Pope to pray together during the service will be the first time a monarch and the pontiff have joined together in this type of moment of reflection in the 500 years since the Reformation when, in 1534, King Henry VIII declared himself as head of the Church of England and broke from the papal authority of the Rome Catholic Church. In another historic step, the King will be made ‘Royal Confrater’ of the Abbey of St Paul’s Outside the Walls. The abbot of the community and the archpriest of the basilica wished to confer the title and received the Pope’s approval to do so. To mark the occasion a special seat has been made decorated with the King’s coat of arms. The second story relates to a recent court judgement which must have emerged late in the day and I do not recall seeing in the news headlines. The co-founder of Palestine Action has won a ban on the group’s activities and has also prevailed against the government’s attempt to appeal against this victory. Given that hundreds of people, if not thousands, have been criminalised as terrorists including Quakers and Methodist ministers, it means that some common sense and sense of proportion can now be maintained. Palestine Action can still challenge the decision to ban the group under anti-terror laws after the government lost an appeal. The group was ‘proscribed’ in July, making it illegal to show any support or affiliation for it, following incidents that included breaking into an RAF base. The Home Office appealed after a court granted the group’s co-founder a judicial review and said the ban disproportionately interfered with freedom of speech and assembly. It said the government should also have consulted the group first. Despite the ban, nearly 900 supporters were arrested at a single protest in London last month. The judicial review of the ban was scheduled to begin on 25 November and Friday’s Court of Appeal decision means it can still go ahead. Palestine Action called it a ‘landmark victory’ and said co-founder Huda Ammori had also been granted permission to appeal on two further grounds. Reacting after the court’s decision, Ms Ammori called the ban ‘absurdly authoritarian’ and ‘one of the most extreme attacks on civil liberties in recent British history’. She said 2,000 people had been arrested since it was outlawed and arresting ‘peaceful protesters’ under the Terrorism Act was a misuse of resources. The group’s vandalising of aircraft at Brize Norton in June – with two activists reportedly entering on electric scooters – prompted a security review of UK defence sites.

Yesterday, as I was breakfasting, I received a text from one of my Saturday friends calling off the meeting over coffee that we were due to have this morning as two of our regulars had gone down with colds. So I took some time before I actually walked down into town this morning and resolved that I just have a coffee on my own in Waitrose. On my way down into town, I encountered two sets of people of whom one was a near neighbour and the other used to see us regularly in the Waitrose cafe when it was in existence. To people that I meet like this, I generally start off the conversation informing that about the fact of Meg’s death, now five months ago, and to a man (and woman) they all respond in the same way saying that they used to see me pushing Meg up and down the hill and inferred what has happened as now they see me on my own. What I find amazing is that practically everybody I meet ‘knows’ what has happened and used to observe our regular peregrinations with Meg in her wheelchair. As I was intent on choosing the best route for the wheelchair in view of the horrendous condition of the much-patched pavements, we were evidently observed although I was not looking about me to observe them.  On my way down into town and whilst having a coffee, I was actually thinking quite profound philosophical thoughts about how the major religious and ethical systems of the world are often focused on the principle and dualism of opposing forces. Thus in the West, we have the dualism of God/Heaven and the Devil/Hell, Individualism vs. Collectivism,  Capitalism vs Socialism., Newtonian Mechanics vs. 20th century Indeterminacy principle whilst in Hindu thought we have forces of Creation v Destruction and, in Chinese thought,  Ying vs Yang. Of course, we could go on and on in this vein and I realise that my own knowledge base is fragmentary in the extreme and I am only scratching the surface of the comparison of these cosmological principles. Well, it keeps me out of mischief, I suppose. The day has turned out to be cold and overset with a thick and heavy cloud so a profound shift in the weather pattern is evident as early autumn starts to give way to autumn proper.

The night before last, I got myself to bed by just about 10.00pm and then watched the news in bed which has become quite a common pattern over the years. Then I started to watch ‘Question Time’ broadcast on Thursday evenings and which I have watched sporadically. I stopped watching this programme for quite a long time as during the Brexit and other election campaigns, it became a showcase for raucous and generally uninformed opinions on the right of politics which always seemed to deny voice and space to alternative views (the producer of the programme may have had a hand in this) But last night’s programme was completely different although I slept through the first half of it. It came from Bishops Stortford in Hertfordshire which is similar in size to Bromsgrove but may be 15% larger. But then they had a discussion on whether AI (Artificial Intelligence) would transform the UK economy and the topic was very well argued out by the panel members The came a discussion on the local building that was going around Bishop’s Stortford and at this point, I pricked up my ears and became wide awake. A question from the audience was whether the extraordinary amount of building going on around Bishop’s Stortford without a corresponding increase in transport infrastructure, schools, doctors’ surgeries and the like was sustainable. Now it could have been that Bromsgrove was being described at this point as the problems seemed identical and one audience member expressed the view that the town might be the first in the country to become gridlocked as the inevitable consequences of building new houses without the transport and concomitant social infrastructure – a view I have often stated myself about Bromsgrove. What was remarkable was that that the views of the Labour and the Conservative panel members were practically identical with each and they burbled on about developments elsewhere in the UK where transport and other infrastructure had been provided (eventually) but this did not address the local situation at all. The programme chair Fiona Bruce said that they heard similar arguments wherever they went in the country and the same argument could be replicated many times over. The root of the problem is that political machine is geared towards the building of ‘houses’ rather than ‘communities’ because greater population brings increased population and spending power (as well as rateable value) within an area. But spending on transport and local infrastructure has to be provided by the public sector which has been starved of funds for decades and struggles to provide the local services for which is has a statutory obligation with most local funds swallowed up with support for children, the homeless and the elderly. I intend to watch the full repeated programme on the BBC’s iPlayer and pay it my full attention because what I thought was a very local problem is evidently a national one and governments of every political complexion find they cannot fund the required social infrastructure as ‘the money is not available’ In our travels around Spain, my wife and I used to find the opposite of this problem – in their efforts to build ‘comunidades’ (local communities) the local authorities had laid down the infrastructure in the form of roads and ‘locales’ (small, local shops) but the builders building the houses had gone bust leaving half built houses and unfinished developments in many places.

This morning, I got a text from my University of Birmingham friend who I sometimes meet on Sunday mornings but cannot make it this weekend. So, we decided to meet today in my favourite ‘Friday morning’ cafe where I was happy to hand over the wheelie bin numbers I had managed to buy on his behalf. After he had left us,  I got into conversation with the cafe proprietor who also runs a therapy business on the side. I think she has some contacts ‘in the trade’ as it were who I think may be very useful people to me and friends to patronise in the future so she was going to send some text messages on my behalf. These days, I always prefer to go on personal recommendation of this is possible. I then made a couple of purchases on the High Street before I returned home and regaled myself with half a can of soup. I knew that I still had the weekly shop to do because this was rather knocked out of place by the funeral I attended yesterday This week there were one or two items  knew I could get in Aldi but not in Lidl so I reverted back to my previous shopping store for one week. By the time I got home and unpacked the shopping, it was getting pretty late so I made myself a ‘fish on bread’ type meal which I do when it is getting late and/or I am running short of time. 

The night tonight looks pretty dire on the TV so I shall carry on reading my book on ‘The Grieving Brain’ which arrived the other day but I am only up to chapter 2 so far. Then I shall probably do some catchup on good BBC programmes (including Question Time some of which I may have missed) I have looked at the international news and today Trump and the Ukrainian leader are due to have their 3rd meeting -in the Oval office. The first was in February and was a disaster for Zelenskyy as first J D Vance, the American Vice President and then Trump himself tried to tear him to shreds and to humiliate him. But the second meeting after the meeting of the European leaders made Trump appear much more conciliatory but no one knows how this third 3rd meeting will pan out. Zelenskyy is trying to persuade Trump to allow him to have some Tomahawk cruise missiles to use (or threaten to use) against Putin but whether Trump will go this far is a very open question. If Ukraine is allowed use of the Tomahawk missile system, then bases deep within Russia (eg those that manufacture thousands of drones) could be attacked directly as the range of the Tomahawk is much more substantial. Modern conventional variants have a range of 995 miles (1,600km) and they fly low to the ground at a speed of 550 miles an hour. If the American president does allow Ukraine to have these more modern weapons, then certainly the balance of the war will change but the calculation must be that rather than brining Russia to heel, as it were, that the war actually escalates in intensity.

Yesterday, when I woke up in the morning, my back was giving me a twinge that I could have well done without. I could not think of anything that I had especially done except for the fact that I had stayed rather a long time in one position on the chair in my study whilst I had been writing an email and browsing the web. So took some Ibuprofin which I rarely take and had an early night in a bed well-warmed with the electric blanket and these little therapies seem to have done the trick. Nonetheless, I don’t want this to reoccur so I am hunting round inside the house for some cushions or back supports to try to ensure that this problem does not persist in the future. Getting the car washed yesterday was probably a little bit of therapeutic movement as well but I am noting that things like car washing activities and other outdoor jobs have to be done earlier and earlier as the nights are creeping in on us. I try and line up some interesting TV viewing between the hours of 7.00pm-9.00pm after which time I thinking about getting ready for bed. Last night, I saw a program on the origins of modern archaeology which was interesting enough and this was followed at 9.00pm on the successes of Margaret Thatcher in her early years.  But the hagiography (which means an undue and uncritical biography) of Thatcher eventually overwhelmed me and I turned the TV off and drifted off to sleep to the strains of ClassicFM which was infinitely more relaxing. My Droitwich friend is due to return from holiday in South Africa next week after an extended holiday with family and relatives. We are exchanging texts and mutually wondering about how we can get through the dark days of autumn and winter until the days to start to lengthen again.  The clocks go back in about ten days’ time when so called ‘Summer Time’ or ‘Daylight Saving Time’ comes to an end.

The peace process in Gaza is on a bit of a knife-edge. Hamas has handed over 9 of the promised 28 bodies but is saying that the remainder are buried under mountains of rubble and is asking for specialist equipment to attempt to ascertain the whereabouts of the bodies and then to retrieve them. Given that about 90% of the buildings in Gaza have been damaged if not completely flattened then hundreds and possible even thousands of bodies will be buried in the rubble. Then, of course, the Palestinians have to work out whether the body belonged to one of their own number or a Jewish hostage. There appears to about 19 more bodies to locate and I would be amazed if there was a successful search for half of this number – and the recovery attempts might take months to complete in any case. The Israelis are accusing Hamas of breaking the peace agreement and have responded by cutting the number of aid trucks coming to Gaza by about a half but then ceasefires during conflicts rarely go completely smoothly. I think the world is generally quite shocked about the scale of destruction in Gaza where the reconstruction costs may run into $70bn and will take years.
 
My son called around this morning and it is always good to touch base with him, as they say. I left for town fairly equally to attend my Tai Chi class where the nice and gentle class was taken by the daughter of our usual teacher. Then I had a quick coffee and piece of cake with my newly found ex-Bank manager friend before we both had to dash off for other engagements. In my case, it was to attend a funeral and ensured that I got there three quarters of an hour before the service started in order to secure a parking place for myself. The service was a traditional Catholic Mass and the church was practically full, as we expected that it would be. I personally found the service had several emotional moments in it as I was constantly and vividly reminded of Meg’s funeral which was about four months ago now. Then we repaired to a rather superior old mansion house which is now a restaurant centre but had plenty of space to to cater for weddings, funerals and other celebrations of the ‘rites de passage’ of life.  I sat and ate my refreshments with several parishioners that I knew well by sight and our table was joined both by my Irish friends and also by the elder brother of our parishioner brother whose funeral it was. All in all, I had chats with people that I knew or to whom I was introduced by friendly fellow parishioners, nearly all of whom knew each other of course. There was a strong Irish contingent as part of the parish community and we exchanged stories of how ‘the Troubles’ as they are known in Ireland, both North and South, made its impact on the Irish community which was often the subject of intense surveillance on the part of the English security forces. Altogether, these activities took up much of the afternoon and the funeral party did not start to break away and drift away for home until 5.00am in the afternoon. Now, by an accident of timing, we are going to have a very similar social occasion in exactly one week’s time. We are going to have a formal parish induction of our new priest to be followed by a social event in a meeting room supplied by the local pub which is just across the way from the church. We had a similar function about four years ago on the occasion of the induction of our previous priest. But on this occasion, it will prove to a more satisfying event as I imagine that the age profile will so much younger than that encountered in a funeral setting.  There other opportunities to meet with fellow parishioners and this is to attend the coffee morning event held after the services on a Sunday but I am a little reluctant to break up the pattern of attending on a Saturday evening which I have done over the years. Several years ago, I would never have anticipate that I would find myself part of a church community like this but in the months after Meg’s death, I have found the support of other members of the community both heartwarming and comforting.

I awoke yesterday to weather that was dark and apparently gloomy whilst the economic forecasts facing the country appear to mirror the weather. Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, is expected to have to find up to £30bn at the budget to balance the books, after a U-turn on winter fuel and welfare reforms and a big productivity downgrade by the OBR, which means Britain is expected to earn less in future than previously predicted. Yesterday, the IMF upgraded UK growth projections by 0.1 percentage points to 1.3% of GDP this year – but also trimmed its forecast by 0.1% next year, also putting it at 1.3%. The UK growth prospects are 0.4 percentage points worse off than the IMF’s projects last autumn. The 1.3% GDP growth would be the second-fastest in the G7, behind the US. It looks as though we are in for a regime of both tax rises and also spending cuts as how else is the $30bn to be bridged? All chancellors are desperate for economic growth not only in the UK but across the European continent where projected growth rates seem anaemic. I heard a commentator pose the question that if the USA could achieve much higher growth rates, why should this prove to be so difficult on this side of the pond? But here we are comparing chalk and cheese as the American economy is one large internal market, has a much more dominant ‘hire and fire’ culture in the absence of a strongly unionised workforce and all the big generators of future growth, mostly AI grounded, are based in the United States. The media and the internet is filled with people explaining that they would do if they had the Rachel Reeves dilemma of raising money whilst not breaking manifesto promises. One account that took my eye is what might well emerge and it ran as follows. It is possible that taxes on unearned income will rise, loopholes allowing tax avoidance will be closed and duties on Tobacco, alcohol and fossil fuels (petrol and Diesel in particular) will rise. There are likely to be windfall taxes on the excessive profits of petrol companies. There may be a new duty on Vapes – as they are becoming a health problem. It is rumoured that the proportion of a pensions pot that can be taken as a tax-free lump sum will be reduced from the current 25%. It is also rumoured that National Insurance Contributions by employers (not employees) may rise. Probably the income tax threshold will not rise – particularly the upper threshold. Now all of this sounds very plausible but we shall have to wait until late November to find out. But many eyes are fixed on the inflation rate in September to be published in a week’s time as this will determine the amount by which pensions and benefits may have to rise next April when the new fiscal year commences. The inflation rate may approach 3.9% and is predicted to be the highest in the advanced economies. But I suspect that the Chancellor will announce the end of the ‘triple lock’ by which pensions rise by the highest of the average rise in wages, the inflation rate or 2.5% and from which pensioners have undoubtedly benefitted even during the years of austerity.

After I had exercised, showered and breakfasted, I set out for the Methodist Centre where there is always some company as well as very reasonably priced tea or coffee and cake. I located myself on a table where was a married couple and a widow (as it turned out) and we quite an entertaining discussion. In fact, the experience this morning was as pleasant as my experience in the same venue a week ago was disappointing. One of the ladies had been brought up in a Catholic school and associated church so we swapped tales of the repressive nature of 1950’s Catholicism. One story that I recounted and my fellow coffee drinker swore happened in the school she attended was the following. The teenage girls were expressly forbidden to wear black patent leather shoes as it was it felt that young adolescent males would be driven wild with lust at the reflection of the girl’s knickers in their shoes and this had to be avoided at all costs. Actually, this story is widely told, and believed, but I think that the true story comes from a book written in 1950’s America which was subsequently made into a Broadway production. Another imprecation was never to enter the church of another denomination as it was felt that that you might be consumed by the fires of hell should this occur. Of course, we all giggle about this nowadays but for some, the influence of their teachers, particularly if they happened to be nuns, stayed with them for decades. After I left the centre, I decided to visit a local hardware store with the principal intention of buying some plastic ‘wheelie bin’  numbers for which the whole town is going mad as all of our old bins, complete with their house numbers, are being exchanged for new ones of a different design. Now at this point, Sod’s law comes into effect which is that if things can go wrong, they will. I was looking for four items in the hardware store and each of the items was either out of stock or not sold anymore. But then I had a chance meeting with my Irish friend who told me that Poundland had a stock of numbers and she had seen them the day before. So I made haste to the local store where, of course, the very number that wished to purchase was out of stock. A fellow customer, searching for the same number as myself and I went to see an assistant managing one of the tills to enquire when the stock would be replenished and the lady dived into a box behind the counter and produced what we wanted for each of us. I finished off buying eleven numbers altogether, 3 x. 2 for my University of Birmingham friend, two for my next-door neighbour and finally three for myself. After I had cooked a lunch of ham, beans and potatoes, I made myself wash the car although I felt a little disinclined to do it. One of the factors impelling me on was the funeral I am due to attend tomorrow and I always have the feeling, irrational though it may be, that it is only a mark of respect to turn up in a clean car.