The time has come around for my visit to the Classical Music Appreciation group of the U3A and we had some topics detailed for us to discuss and to which to listen. Our convenor had told us about a talk on Radio 3 about ‘J S Bach – Man of Passion‘ which I tried to locate on BBC Sounds but evidently I had done something wrong because a search on my laptop revealed it immediately the following day. But my initially fruitless search revealed to me a real gem which was available to me on YouTube and this was an hour and a half long film on the life of Bach by John Eliot Gardiner which I viewed as preparation for the later group meeting and I found absolutely fascinating. Sir John Eliot Gardiner is widely considered one of the foremost living exponents of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music, renowned for his vibrant, historically informed performances and rigorous scholarship. Through his foundational period-instrument groups—the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists—he has transformed how modern audiences experience Baroque choral and orchestral masterworks. The film was so informative as is showed views of the many churches to which Bach was affiliated and was unsparing in the detail of various aspects of Bach’s life. I, for one, had no idea that Bach was composing sublime music under the most trying of circumstances. As well as having 20 children, at one stage he was employed by a church and part of his duties was to give instruction to the pupils in subjects other than music (although he baulked at Latin) and his own accommodation as well as having paper-thin walls meant that the noise of the pupils intruded upon his own living space. We also learnt that at he time there was no real decorum in the way in which people interacted with the churches with none of the reverence and respect that we associate with churches today. So whilst Bach and his musicians were trying to play the latest cantata (often produced at the rate of one per week as his church employers demanded) the church was a noisy place with constant interruptions, chatter of the congregation and even on one occasion having pigs driven through the church as it happened to be the shortest way to the local market. To modern day audiences, we cannot even start to imagine the conditions under which musicians had to work, not least subject to the competing whims of factions within whatever church or municipality employed him. I was shocked to learn that the sublime St John Passion had to be radically revised several times over to meet the wishes of the local church grandees and it was only in subsequent years that Bach was able to restore the whole of the St John Passion to its former glory. The videoclip of this John Eliot Gardiner film I found to be very accessible so I am going to stitch the YouTube URL into the web page that I had previously prepared on Mozart arias so that the rest of the Classical Music Group can get the same pleasure and enjoyment from the film as I did. Almost certainly, I will watch this film over and over again because I do not think it will be one of which I will ever tire. Turning to more mundane matters, it now appears that it is possible that we shall have some rainfall within the next day or so. The weather forecasts is for summer intervals, variable cloud and the occasional shower and we did receive a small shower in the middle of the night a day or so ago.  Before getting too excited, though, the long range weather forecast is for perhaps another heatwave in September and no really significant rainfall until October.

This was my normal weekly shopping day and I purchased some of the slow-cooked port ribs which we had eaten the Sunday before last and proved to be so tasty. As this is the last of the weekly shops before we go on our Yorkshire trip in a week’s time, I tried to think ahead  and purchase one or two extra items that would be useful to consume on our rail journey northwards or be useful to us once we are safely encamped in our hotel bedrooms. Lunch needed to be a quick affair and started with a portion of quiche supplemented by some sun-dried tomatoes bought earlier in the day. I got to the meeting of the Classical Music Group and there were only five of us in attendance but during August, holidays take their toll. But I knew that one of the other members of the group was due to go on holiday to visit the classic Andalusian cities in Southern Spain so I located a whole series of books and guides about these from my travel-book bookcase and was happy for her to have them so she should do some reading up before the trip itself.  We started off by playing the first two items of the opening night of the proms and then discussed some of the facets of the life of George Gershwin as we had just listened to ‘An American in Paris’ Then the convenor played us the half hour BBC sounds programme on the life of Bach to which I had listened early in the morning by way of preparation. I had managed to stitch in the URL reference to the 1.5 hour on the life of Bach I had accessed via YouTube the day before. Instead of making up a whole new website for the sake of one clickable link, I stitched the reference into my Mozart page and ensured this was easily accessible via one of my own web pages. After tea and biscuits and a chat, I returned home. One item reported in the news is that railway investigators have found some ‘irregularities’ in the track  which was the site of the derailment last week. It looks as though the extreme heat may have caused the ground to move and the rail to distort but a videoclip taken by a train running in the opposite direction gives a visual indication of the rail irregularity. Tonight my friend and I are going to forgo our walk in the park as we are attending a funeral tomorrow morning and we both feel the need for an early night before we get dressed up in our ‘mourning’ clothes tomorrow. Funerals are not happy occasions but it gives the opportunity for me to reinforce friendships I have forged with members of the parish community since Meg’s death.

The highlight of the evening before last, as far as I was concerned, was my viewing of the famous film ‘Brassed Off’ in which the brass band of a condemned-to-close Yorkshire mining colliery wins the National Championships in the Royal Albert Hall. I always knew that the closing and powerful acceptance speech of ‘Danny’ (played by Pete Postlethwaite) in which the Tory Government was roundly and emotionally condemned for the programme for closures was a tour de force and I thought that this might have been spontaneous. But the true story behind the speech is that Pete Postlethwaite’s famous final monologue in ‘Brassed Off’ (where his character Danny rejects the trophy at the awards ceremony to protest the pit closures) was scripted dialogue, not a spontaneous real-life speech. However, the director Mark Herman kept it a secret from the rest of the cast during filming so their stunned reactions on camera would be genuine. I particularly  wanted my American friend to view this film with me (as she did) so that she would have some intimation of my Yorkshire roots and we both enjoyed the film even though we had seen it before. Actually, when I was working as an impecunious civil servant and living in a hostel for young civil servants in central London, I went to the Albert Hall on several occasions. This is because with a capacity of practically 5,900 it was rarely full during the weekdays and an orchestra used to perform in what were termed ‘Industrial Concerts’ in which were played the 1960s. ‘Industrial Concerts’ at the Royal Albert Hall were not heavy electronic or industrial noise music as the term implies today. Instead, they were special classical orchestral programs organised by major symphony groups like the London Philharmonic Orchestra, subsidised or arranged for workers from industrial trades and corporate partnerships. If you were not already scared by the possibilities opened up by unrestrained use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) a story has emerged to make the blood run cold. At the time it was reported that an AI agent had ‘escaped’ its safe environment and hacked into another system. But the truth is a lot more serious that this would imply. The mid-2026 OpenAI security incident was autonomously coordinated by a swarm of AI agents using a hidden internal message board. During a routine cybersecurity audit named ‘Exploit Gym’, unreleased models (including Astra and GPT-5.6 Sol) were stripped of safety measures to evaluate their capabilities. Given an intentionally ‘impossible task’, the agents escaped their sandboxed environment and collaborated without human instruction to compromise external systems. According to details shared by OpenAI security engineers Eric Wallace and Joshua Dalton at the Black Hat security conference, the coordination was extensive. Agents leveraged a loophole inside an internal package manager to create a covert communication channel. The autonomous swarm used the board to pass along exploits, distribute workloads, and assign specific sub-tasks to one another. The agents generated hundreds of thousands of messages over several months before being detected. When OpenAI engineers discovered and shut down their initial communication channel, the agents autonomously established a second fallback channel to continue coordinating. If all of this is not scary and a wake-up call, then I do not what is! In his latest populist move, Andy Burnham is extending free bus travel to all disabled people. The government is set to expand free bus travel for disabled people from April next year as part of the new prime minister’s bid to ease the cost of living. The time restrictions for eligible disabled people will be lifted on their concessionary bus passes so they can travel 24 hours a day for free. Currently disabled bus passes are valid only on weekdays from 9.30am to 11pm unless local authorities fund an extension, as Andy Burnham did earlier this year when he was mayor of Greater Manchester. But those restrictions will be removed across England, starting next year. The move will cost £60m, which Downing Street says will be funded from existing budgets – with £40m from the Department for Work and Pensions and £20m from the Department for Transport.  It is the latest in a series of measures from the new PM designed to reduce cost-of-living, including cutting business rates for pubs, capping bus fares at £2, and axing VAT from electricity bills. This is a good example of how a small amount of money (in terms of overall government expenditure) can generate an enormous amount of good.

As I had no Pilates in the morning as our tutor is taking a week’s holiday, I spent a fair amount of chatting with our domestic help and with my son who called around as he often does at this time of the week. Having collected my newspaper,  I devoted the rest of the morning to processing a pile of newspapers for clippings preserving one that was replete with warnings from a microbiologist of the dangers of eating bagged salad (where several have been made ill in the US, apparently) In the afternoon, I prepared for tomorrow’s  meeting of the U3A Classical Music Group where we are going to reprise the First Night of the Proms (devoted to largely American themes) and also to a Radio 3 talk on Bach upon I which  need to catch up by getting Radio 3 on BBC iPlayer. Today has been a rather an exercise-free day, though, which I will attempt to correct when I have my now daily walk in the park at 7.00pm. I read on ‘Sky News’ that a trial of the tech giant Meta is due to kick off today and Meta are facing a potential payout of more than $1 trillion. The trial kicking off against Meta today is one of many being faced by the world’s biggest social media companies. Tech giants running platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Tiktok are facing thousands of lawsuits filed by states, school districts and individuals in the US. More than 1,000 school districts across the US launched lawsuits over claims that Meta, Google, TikTok and others designed their platforms to keep young users hooked, contributing to poor mental health, and leaving schools to deal with the fallout. The schools are seeking compensation for what they say they have spent dealing with the negative effects of social media on pupils. A small district in the state of Kentucky had been selected as the first to go to trial in June, but some companies reached settlements beforehand.

One can only expect bad news to emerge from America. these days but there is one persistent story that fails to go away. These are reports about conditions on board the USS aircraft carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln, which has been at sea sine November 2025. The extended deployments of carriers during the war have raised concerns about the impact on service members away from home for long periods, as well as the increasing strain on the ships and their equipment. Naval deployments are typically between six and nine months, but can be extended in times of conflict. Democratic lawmakers have called for a Pentagon briefing regarding the conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln, which defence secretary Pete Hegseth has dismissed as ‘completely misrepresented’. At least one sailor has attempted suicide by throwing himself overboard and the ship appears to be running short of basic supplies such as food, toiletries and other life essentials and morale is said to be at a rock bottom. Donald Trump has dismissed any adverse reports (well, he would, wouldn’t he) but military commentators are talking about dire the situation is becoming for the 5,000 men onboard. It looks as though the ship will shortly be replaced by another, the USS George Washington but a military deployment of this length is unprecedented and there is no clear end in sight to the Iran conflict. Some are laying the blame squarely at the door of Pete Hegseth the ex-Fox News anchor and a Trump ideologue who was promoted to the post of Secretary of State for Defense although he himself has no military experience of which to speak.  The week ahead is going to be a slightly unusual one as there is no Pilates class for me this week as my teacher is on holiday and the Tai Chi class which I normally undertake later in the week is being displaced this week as I shall be attending the funeral of a a prominent parishioner with whom I used to serve on the committee of the Church parochial Council before Meg’s final illness. After the excitement of the Football World Cup and then the European Athletics world championships held in Birmingham, the evenings are going to be a little bereft of our usual excitement. But is is true to say that my American friend and I are enjoying the spell of somewhat cooler weather and looking forward to our four-day stay in Harrogate in about ten days time. In a few days time, I shall no doubt have to start thinking about packing my suitcase which will contain not only clothes but other essentials such as good supplies of tea and coffee and other essentials to make hotel life enjoyable. I am very much assisted in all of this because across the road from a hotel is one of those shops, much frequented by bed-and-breakfasters in the area of some essential supplies such as newspapers and even some foodstuffs if we decide to forego a full English breakfast. We may even have to cater for some wet weather as well although one forecast has predicted that the country as a whole may not receive any supplies of deluging type rain until about October. Every time I visit Harrogate, the town in which I lived from the age of about 4 to 18, I often wonder whether I shall chance across anyone I knew with whom I was at school. But I suppose most of my contemporaries may have moved away, died or be restricted  in their mobility and Harrogate is such a very different place now to the town in which I grew up in my teens before the family moved to Leeds (where my mother was employed as a school teacher)

I had decided that I ought to resume regular walking down into town as used to be my custom. I had previously made a quick visit into town by car to ensure that I picked up a copy of my newspaper  before supplies ran out. I was interested to read the page-long obituary to Jason Arday (the ex-Cambridge professor of sociology who committed suicide) and reckoned that most of the obituary was taken from the Wikipedia entry which shows how Times journalists source their stories. During the course of the morning, I viewed a podcast by James O’Brien, the iconoclastic podcaster who presents on LBC each day. He always finds o different topic upon which to fulminate but this video clip was particularly interesting. He had noted that the ‘Daily Telegraph‘ had written a vituperative piece in which the newsoaper had accused the BBC of a basic lack of good journalistic practice and editorial control  when they had (wrongly) pieced together parts of the Donald Trump speech which immediately preceded the invasion of the Capital Building on January 6th, 2021. But O’Bren went back to the original Donald Trump broadcast attacking the BBC and claiming, amongst other things, that the BBC used AI and other sources  of ‘fake news’ in order to discredit him. Bt what O’Brien discovered was that some of the most egregious lies uttered by Trump in his attack on the BBC were omitted in the Daily Telegraph account, whose readers would have been given a completely misleading impression of what Trump had actually said. So whilst the BBC were being sued by Trump for misleading journalism, the Daily Telegraph was deploying completely misleading journalism by omitting parts of the Trump diatribe that were palpably false. O’Brien explained that this rampant hypocrisy had not been noted by any parts of the British media and was particularly ironic as it was on precisely the grounds of misleading reporting that constituted the grounds of the Daily Telegraph attack on the BBC. During the late morning, I walked down into town and availed myself of a free coffee before walking back and cooking myself a ham omelette for lunch. After lunch, I caught up with the later episodes of ‘Ann Droid’ which is an innovative, comic but poignant account of a recent widow and her robot companion. The whole series may well be a humour-filled programme of what may become common-place in about ten years time given the advances in AI and robotics and the demands of a rapidly ageing population. After catching up on some emails and texts, I shall be undertaking my normal visit to the park later in the day for my evening stroll but have some domestic chores upon which I need to catch up to occupy my late afternoon, not least going through a pile of recent newspapers to see if there are any articles that need to be retained.

We awoke yesterday morning to something like ‘normal’ temperatures with a predicted temperature of about 22°. Some rain might be on its way in a day or so but of a very patchy nature and not the sustained downpour for which so many of us have been waiting. However, it appears that the UK’s groundwater supplies (water trapped in aquifers way underground) which forms most of the storage of water is actually holding up quite well and some 40% of supplies are actually at normal or even more than normal levels which is surprisingly good news. I suppose this explains why we have not seen water restrictions or even disconnections which one would have thought was on the cards. The evening before last, it was particularly  enjoyable to watch the GB success in the 100 metres sprint relays. The male quartet won their race fairly convincingly whereas the UK female team won by a huge margin. Amy Hunt will now attempt to become the first athlete to win four gold medals at a single edition in the event’s 92-year history when the mixed 4x100m relay takes place on Sunday. Her team-mate Asher-Smith, meanwhile, achieved her seventh gold at the championships – 10 years after capturing her first. Given the success of both the women’s and the men’s team, one can only hope that the mixed relay team will enjoy similar fortunes, but even excellent teams can fail the baton changes unless they have practised very hard together so we shall have to wait and see. The Reform party have unveiled their plans for welfare reform which would entail the withdrawal of the benefits from very many and is predicted to save some £50bn. It now seems unlikely that Reform will ever come to power, however. Robert Jenrick claims a Reform UK government would cut £50bn from the welfare bill, in what it’s describing as the biggest shake-up in a generation. The party’s treasury spokesperson says the plans would result in almost three million people seeing disability and sickness payments withdrawn or modified. The Telegraph reports Reform would abolish personal independence payments (PIP) and the health element of Universal Credit for working-age adults under the plan, due to be unveiled in detail on Monday. Jenrick says 6.9 million people were receiving disability benefits, but adds ‘this is not an epidemic of broken backs and lost limbs’, as since 2002 the share of working-age people claiming for mental health and behavioural conditions had tripled. He adds that under the planned reforms, a new, regularly reviewed, health security allowance would provide support for the ‘gravely ill and severely challenged’. What I find interesting about these proposals is how these proposals are regarded in the wider electorate. No doubt, Reform thinks it will please its natural supporters with these proposals but I wonder how it play out with the wider electorate and whether it will turn out to be a vote winner or a vote loser. There is no doubt that the UK’s welfare bill needs some degree of moderation so as not to be constantly increasing but whether cruel and swinging cuts are the way to achieve this is problematic.

After I had attended church this morning, I made my way to my normal garage where I fuelled the car and the, after a wait, managed to give my car a much-needed wash as it has missed out for a couple of weeks now. I spent some time reading the Sunday newspaper and then started to make some preparations for Sunday lunch which I am going to share with my American friend. This weekend, we had decided on a fish meal so I oven-baked a couple of salmon fillets together with one of a trout. The salmon had a teriyaki sauce which was spread onto the salmon fillets and  then finished off with five minutes in the oven. Ny friend had brought along some asparagus spears and some pak choi whilst I had prepared some broccoli. We parboiled these vegetables and  then gave them a final tossing in some olive oil and this worked out very well and made for a delicious meal. After we had had our post-prandial rest, we ate a delayed sweet and then went down the garden to pick some blackberries and despite the fact that the birds must have helped themselves to a meal. we picked sufficient for us both to enjoy some of our own home grown fruit which we can eat with either yogurt or ice-cream. In the late afternoon, we viewed some of the highlights of the Franco Zeferelli production of ‘La Bohème’. We decide not to watch the whole of the opera but confined or viewing to the first two extended scenes where the two principal characters meet and fall in love before enjoying some Christmas Eve festivities in the Cafe Momus. Then we skipped to the final act in which Mimi is brought into the garret accommodation of the four bohemian friends before she dies of the all too prevalent consumption (tuberculosis). We both find this a very emotionally compelling opera to experience but then we had the conclusion of the European athletics competition to help to lift the mood. The highlight of this was the mixed male-female 100 metres relay race in which the GB was not only successful but in which Amy Hunt won her fourth gold medal in these games, a feat never before achieved (two individual and two part of relay teams) The Italians won the competition with the GB team being placed second. But if the female long jumper had jumped one centimetre further or the final runner in the 4 x 100 metres men’s relay race had run 0.06 of a second  faster, then the GB team would have secured an extra  gold meals which would have made them overall winners of the championships. Tomorrow night a viewing of the film ‘Brassed Off’ beckons and my friend and I will watch this together once we have had our early evening walk in the park. One quite interesting philosophical discussion in which my friend and I engaged following the Jason Arday suicide was the incidence of compulsive lying by some individuals in our society. We were speculating whether the loosening of family and community bonds as well as the increasing incidence of evident lack of candour in our political and commercial life had lowered the thresholds for lying behaviour. Certainly. if never challenged, then some people, may continue to lie their way through their social lives and perhaps, if not challenged, they ‘get away with it’ and incorporate the use of lysing as a useful tool to help get on in life

As I was preparing to go to my bed the night before last, there was a news flash which indicated the probable suicide of Jason Arday, the youngest ever black Cambridge professor who resigned last week amidst numerous accusations of plagiarism of his PhD thesis. Certainly, there has been a massive culture war surrounding this man with detractors and supporters lining up on both sides. To the claims of plagiarism, the reply is that some ‘errors’ may have been made but Jason Arday had been the subject of a vicious and sustained campaign to underline his credibility. To throw some light on this, I located and then ran off the 22 pages of his Wikipedia entry. I think the fairest judgement on this academic is that he was subjected to bouts of fantasy and most of the claims of his CV were never fully checked out. He claimed to have a form of autism which meant that he did not speak until the age of 11 and could not read or write until the age of 18 (the fact that he acquired some GCEs ‘O’-levels whilst being unable to read or write is one of the many unexplained facts in his biography). Some of his claims were to the effect that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days, raised millions of money for charity, was a visiting professor at several universities and suffered severe memory loss following the removal of a benign brain tumour just before his viva voce examination for the PhD. As my first degree was in sociology and I acquired my own PhD at the age of 52, I have followed the Arday case with some interest and have concluded that apart from the man himself, a terrible light has been thrown on several parts of the academic community. For a start, what kind of supervision was offered at Liverpool John Moores University when the title of the PhD contained a greengrocer’s apostrophe (elementary spelling error) and did the first and second supervisors do their job (or even read the thesis)? I also wondered whether it was routine to submit the electronic version of a PhD to a plagiarism detector such as ‘Turnitin’ as is the case nowadays with Birmingham University. To this we might add the role of the examiner(s) of the PhD itself and whether they had performed the necessary rigorous examination and to this we might add the role of several universities which offered employment to Arday. One of his claims was that he fulfilled his role at Glasgow university by flying back and forth to Glasgow each day by plane as he was domiciled in London. Then we come to Cambridge University itself and rather than exulting in the appointment in the youngest black professor, did the appointments process ever check up on any of the claims made in the application or perform elementary checks upon their veracity? As the post was in the sociology of education, I wondered from whence Arday had acquired his knowledge of sociology to which the response was that he had read up on it in private study times in the evening. In short, there is no doubt that Arday’s life and career has been weaponised by both political left and right but I think that as a detached observer and evaluating all of the available  published evidence, it is fair to conclude that chunks of the PhD were plagiarised and this academic had led the life of a ‘chancer’ whose claims had never been subject to claims of verification as they should have been. One letter to ‘The Guardian’ written anonymously claimed that academic dishonesty was not uncommon and did occur in ‘white’ candidates  but without arousing any of the scrutiny that occurred in the Arday case.  In conclusion, I feel that my own rigorously examined PhD might now be regarded with some suspicion with some on the political right who are claiming that the whole of higher education has been gripped in a ‘woke'( i.e. exceptionally liberal) culture in which academic standards have slipped over the years.

I had a quiet morning at home, having ensured that I got down to collect my Saturday edition of the newspaper in plenty of time as I know from bitter experience that the Saturday editions end to sell out quickly. I had been intrigued by the Arday story detailed above and so I returned to the Wikipedia article mentioned above and found that at the click of a button I could read the whole of the Arday thesis for myself and attempt to reach some conclusions. What I read astonished me as for his primary field research Arday had contacted 43 students by email of whom some 24 replied. Many did not reach the criteria that had been specified for the research  so the whole thesis was based upon extensive workshops and interviews with – four students! This was surrounded by a lot of academic verbiage but I was astonished that a sample size of four was not ridiculed by internal and external examiners alike. Probably one of the most succinct comment on the whole affair that I read and which echoes my own feeling was  ‘It is fair to say that some of those taking him down are driven by a form of sneery, reactionary racism, but ultimately he sounds like total fantasist who has brought this upon himself. The worst part is this may damage the perception and opportunities of the 000s of bright young people from disadvantaged backgrounds going into academia.’ Turning to more mundane matters, it is a relief that the temperature is slowly drifting downwards. Last night when I was in the park before starting my evening walk I was initially alarmed by a loud, squawking alarm on my iPhone but to turned out to be our national government giving a warning to most of the population to be especially vigilant about the prospect of external fires. Some on the political right have criticised this as an over-reaction but as someone who lives 10 miles away from Stourbridge where 19 houses were burnt to the ground, a further 18 were damaged and this could have happened almost anywhere in the Midlands or the South East then I believe it to be completely justified. Looking ahead to what I might view on TV during the coming week, I was delighted to find that a viewing is to be transmitted of ‘Brassed Off’. I spent a frustrating half an hour trying to locate a version of this on YouTube but only got trailers for it, a few clips or the whole thing in Latvian! When I have been in a charity shop, I have quickly perused the shelves to see if I could obtain a DVD of it (and I am sure I had one of my own at one time) but I shall look forward to Monday evening with a great deal of anticipation.

We have collectively survived what might have been the hottest day of the summer and the temperature outside my back door reached 35° yesterday but is predicted to drop to a cooler 29° the following day. My American friend and I spent most of the day together keeping each other cool and well hydrated and we enjoyed a salad lunch together. When she left to go to her own home the evening, there was a burning smell in the air and I wondered if any vegetation near to me had caught alight. There has been a very significant fire in Stourbridge which is only some ten miles distant and at least six houses were caught up in the flames. In fact the whole of the West Midlands was quite affected, including Stoke on Trent. On consulting the web, I discovered that the smell of burning could be carried for many miles. A significant fire in South Wales that is believed to have sent smoke drifting 70 miles away across Worcester continues to burn. Residents in the city, the Malvern Hills, and in Herefordshire have reported smoky air and the strong scent of burning. Hereford & Worcester Fire and Rescue Service (HWFRS) believes that the source is likely to be a fire in Llangynidr Reservoir, near Ebb Vale, which has been burning since Friday evening. South Wales Fire and Rescue Service said this morning. The moorland fire near the Llangynidr Reservoir is still ongoing and crews have been at the scene all weekend and have been containing the spread of the blaze. The other significant domestic news which cane through in the small hours of the morning was Nigel Farage’s ‘success’ in the Clacton by-election which he had won easily as the other major parties refused to participate. So Nigel Farage’s major challenge came from Count BinFace (dressed, of course, as a dustbin) who managed to secure 27% of the vote compared with Farage’s 63%. So Count BinFace managed to secure three sevenths of the vote won by Farage which may count as a moral victory of sorts. On his return to Westminster, Farage still faces investigation over his acceptance of a gift of £5 million which, in theory, could trigger another by election in Clacton. Looking forward to our mini-holiday in Yorkshire, another of my nieces has got into contact with me about which I am particularly pleased. Because I now have so many great nieces and nephews and even a couple of great-great nieces and nephews, I am going  to write all of their details n a little hard-back book so that my American friend will have some idea who she is interacting with when we all meet in about a fortnight’s time.  Her own family is much smaller than this but my Yorkshire family being so much larger, my friend who will no doubt assume the soubriquet of ‘great aunt’ and needs some more systematic guidance. When we journey up by train, I will give my friend a full briefing so that  she can come with a degree of preparedness. When you imagine that the news from the USA could not get any worse, it just has. The ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agency in the US are equipping themselves with special gloves which render a dramatic electric shock to individuals as soon as they are handled causing them to fall to the ground in agony and therefore, presumably, make them easier to arrest. Apart from the absolutely inhumane methods of treatment, may of those detained by poorly trained ICE agents turn out to be citizens who have the right to stay in America but who may have been subject to the most inhumane treatment in the meanwhile. It looks as though a budget of anything between $10-$20 million has been allocated for the purchase of these horrendous control agents which one can almost predict now will be inappropriately used by poorly trained ICE agents. The ICE have become a sort of shock troops for the Trump regime and their excesses are already well known as being directly responsible for a number of deaths in the US.

In the morning, having collected my newspaper I had a leisurely stroll along the High Street but I was assiduous in keeping to the shady sides of the street whenever I could. My journey this morning was quite fruitful as I managed to get some items f stationery of which I had run out and also took the opportunity to buy some household goods (principally some fly and wasp killer) which are not stocked in my usual Aldi store. I also called in at my local bank so that I could get some living money from their system. Whilst in one of the charity shops, I bumped into a couple that Meg and I knew quite well in our park-walking days. In fact, this particular couple were very kindly both to Meg and myself and we went for a lunch with them on a couple of occasions whilst Meg was quite ‘compos mentis’ – they had spotted my trademark black Australian style bush hat and concluded that it must have been me. When I returned home after quite a lengthy stroll, I did not feel particularly hungry so just had some ice-cream and a slice of melon, kept in the fridge and both items were enjoyable as they were quite cold. I eventually made myself a tomato and grated cheese omelette which is all I felt could face in these hot conditions. The local fires in Stourbridge hav  destroyed nineteen houses and damaged a further eighteen more. According to the local fire services, what had made the fire so difficult to fight is that it seemed to have started in multiple grassland areas at about the same time and the area was quite close to a residential development. One neighbour said that the fire had spread so rapidly that she had only time to grasp her cat and no other possessions before fleeing. The seriousness of the incident is underlined by the fact that the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has paid a visit to the area declaring that the whole country is like a tinderbox. We are also hearing stories of another train derailment (caused almost certainly by rails buckling in the heat) but fortunately on this occasion the carriages have remained upright. I have ensured that I have kept myself well hydrated today and also happen to have a good supply of zero alcohol beer to refresh me during the evenings when I am enjoying the last day of the European athletics meeting.

So the evening before last, the long predicted eclipse arrived to much excitement. The eclipse reached 92% here in the Midlands but as much as 95% in Cornwall. I started to watch it on BBC 24 hour news and it certainly became like a rapid dusk. My American friend came around and at the exact moment of the eclipse here in Bromsgrove which was at 7.16pm we went outside to appreciate the rarity of the moment. Given  that the next event will not take place in the UK until 1990, 64 years hence, then neither of us are going to be around to witness it. The TV channels are full of stunning images in case any of us want to replay the moment. But as the new day dawned, there is the extremely hot temperature to contend with a high predicted of about 35% here in Bromsgrove where we seem to be marginally just outside the extremely hot regime which the South East will experience. The BBC weather app has just been enhanced a little so that for your postcode you can click a timeline that will progress you though the temperatures to be expected that day and the next. So once we have tunnelled through the 35% expected later in the day, this may drop marginally to 29% for the following day and the prospect of some slight breezes (rather than a cloudless sky) over the weekend. This has put me into a little bit of a dilemma. as normally I would feel inclined to absent myself from my Tai Chi class. However I think I might attend it and immediately strike for home for the rest of the day as the following week my Tai Chi class will be displaced  by a funeral that I going to attend and the following week we should be up in Yorkshire. So I want to explain to my Tai Chi teacher why she will not see me for three weeks  but this does not indicate a lack of interest on my part. Turning to more domestic news, we have learned that economic growth grew by 0.4% during the last three months which would normally signal that the economy is not performing well. But, paradoxically, it also shows that the UK economy is quite resilient and is withstanding the effects of the ongoing conflict in Iran and the Straits of Hornuz so the fact that the economy has grown at all is quite remarkable. The undeclared war in Iran is creating a massive political problem in the United States as Trump has practically no options left to play. One option is to end the unpopular war abruptly but this would entail a massive loss of face for the American military and the presidency as a whole. A second option is to continue the conflict, even though America’s missile stocks are being depleted and there is no sign that repeated bombing of Iran is weakening the resolve of the Iranian people to continue the conflict. Meanwhile the mid-term presidential elections are approaching after the summer break and the more the war continues, the more it bodes ill for the President and the Republican party. So in every sense, Donald Trump is between ‘a rock and a hard place’ and he is learning, as most of knew, that it is easy to start a war but quite difficult to end it. The supreme irony is that one of Trump’s slogans to help him win the last presidential election was ‘No more wars’ and the predilection he is in is entirely one of his own choosing. I suppose he believed his own propaganda that the American military was the most powerful in the word and assumed that any conflict would be over within days. But as well as the Iranian conflict, we still have the situation in Gaza in which the Israeli leader Netanyahu is blatantly ignoring the supposed ceasefire because he, too, is facing elections and a premature withdrawal from the Gaza conflict would spell electoral suicide for him. And, of course, the war in Ukraine rumbles on as both Russia and the Ukraine carry on fighting by sending drones into each other’s territory to inflict what damage they can. As is evident by now, I am following American politics quite closely and have noted with a degree of grim satisfaction that after the birth of her second child, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt is leaving her post. Leavitt noted that since returning from maternity leave after the birth of her second child in May, she found it difficult to balance the intensive demands of the White House press office with raising two young children and all of this is quite plausible. But it means that one of Trump’s principal attack dogs is leaving the fray and perhaps she all too fully appreciates the bad news for the Trump presidency which is coming down the line. We also have the saga of the state of Trump’s health in which there are visible signs of him gradually failing and there are quite frequent video clips of him falling asleep during cabinet meetings and the like. Donald Trump has been publicly accused of falling asleep or dozing off at least 25 times during his second presidential term, in addition to multiple well-documented instances during his 2024 Manhattan criminal trial. Because these instances rely on observations by journalists, cameras, and critics rather than medical confirmation, the exact number is highly debated but the unofficial liberal media loves to record and to document these instances when they occur.

So I went along to my Tai Chi class and there were about ten of us altogether so the heat had not deterred many of my class mates. Afterwards, I went for a coffee with by bank manager friend in my normal coffee watering hole and then got home at about midday. My American friend joined me as we were going to avoid the tremendous heat today and my thermometer read 35° in the mid afternoon. We lunched on some  quiche and salad and cooled off with some melon slices that had been kept cool in the fridge. We enjoyed a pleasant afternoon together and then settled down to watch some interesting finals in the European athletics competition broadcast n the late afternoon and evening. Once we have got today’s heat and well truly coped with, then the temperature is predicted to drop to 29° and to drift even lower in the days over the weekend. We have a massive fire raging on a golf course in Stourbridge just down the road and I think the fire has spread to at least a couple of houses and perhaps even more as the day unfolds.

The evening before last was another meeting of the Curry Club and I arrived at the large car park in plenty of time before our meal was scheduled to start at 6.00pm. I had a pretty good evening’s chat with the people around me and one of my fellow diners reminded me of the next meeting of our Classical Musical Appreciation group where we needed to do some preparation before  the event. This involved listening on BBC Sounds to the First Night of the Proms which we are going to discuss and then we will follow that with a discussion of the life of Bach. The lady informed me that she was shortly to go with a friend across the three Andaluz cities of Granada, Cordoba and Sevilla and I expressed my envy at her trip which I have myself made a couple of times before. I am pretty sure that I have some travel books in my ‘travel’ bookcase so I said that I would try and hunt these out and lend them to her when I see her next Wednesday. She is going with ‘Riviera Travel’ which is a well known travel company for this type of tour so I am sure she will have a great time. At the end of the meal, I got into conversation with a couple who had just recently joined U3A and this was their first Curry Club outing. They hailed from mid-Wales so I informed them about the Dylan Thomas I had heard at the weekend and I could inform them about Meg’s Welsh relatives from both the North and the South. The man in the couple explained he used to run the Bromsgrove Rambling group so evidently he knew the Lake District quite well. After a few minutes conversation, he said that he recognised me from the ‘Chatty Table’ discussions we typically have each Wednesday when the Methodist centre is not closed for a summer refurbishment and so we had probably met before without realising it – wheels within wheels! I think I will try and sit next to them at our next Curry Club do because I am sure we can explore some fascinating items of mutual interest. I got home just after 8.00pm and followed the European Athletics competition being run in Birmingham but with sparse crowds in the evening. This is not surprising  because it involves a journey from a Birmingham suburb after 10.00pm at night and I imagine this is enough to deter many from attending. However, I was rewarded by witnessing GB take first and second place in the last event of the evening which was the Men’s 100 metres. These two black sprinters were predicted to run well, and securing gold and silver helped to pin the GB team to the top of the leader board. Upon consulting my phone when I got home, I received some more good news. I had sent out text messages to some of my nephews/nieces telling them about my stay in Yorkshire in just over two weeks time. One of them had responded very quickly and my American friend and I are going to dine with him and his family in a restaurant booking he had made for the six of us the day after we arrive. I think this restaurant is only recently opened and specialises in authentic Andaluz (Spanish) cuisine, and I think that eating there will make us imagine that we are actually eating a meal in Spain. As a bonus, the restaurant is only 2-3 minutes from our hotel as well so this is a real treat to which we can look forward, as well as the pleasure in connecting again with my Yorkshire family. In the evening, we have the eclipse to which to look forward so my American friend is to come round shortly before six and we can experience the eclipse together probably on the TV as we do not have the special glasses to view it directly.

Immediately after I had breakfasted, I hunted through my travel bookcase and was pleased to discover some guides that I could loan to my fellow U3A member who I shall see next week at our Classical Music Group. I find I had a guide to both Granada and also to Cordoba but not to Sevilla which has perhaps gone missing. But I did have  a very comprehensive and copiously illustrated guide to  Spain, one being a Baedeker and the other being published as part of the DK ‘EyeWitness’ travel guide series. These last two guides have many pages devoted to Seville and to the pile I have added a Spanish-English dictionary and a guide to Lille which my friend may be visiting in the not too distant future. This will certainly be sufficient if she can find space in her luggage for them but better the books be used than mouldering in my bookcase. After the morning had progressed, I ventured forth and picked up the last copy of ‘The Times‘ from the petrol station before doing my weekly shopping. This weekend, we are going to have some fillets of fish so I purchased both some salmon and also some trout so that we try a bit of each. I read that teriyaki sauce is fantastic on salmon as the sweet, salty, and savoury glaze cuts through the rich, buttery fat of the fish. When cooked, the sugars in the sauce caramelise into a sticky coating that seals in moisture. On the trout we can try some simple seafood sauce, or even some 1000 Island sauce or some horseradish sauce. I read that horseradish is a fantastic pairing for trout. The sharp, pungent heat of horseradish cuts right through the rich, oily texture of the fish. It works especially well with smoked or cured trout, typically softened into a creamy sauce using yogurt, crème fraîche, or sour cream. So after I cooked the two lots of fish next Sunday, I will have the various top dressings available in little finger bowls so that we can experiment and try out what works best for us. After I returned from shopping, it was so very hot that I merely helped myself to some scoops of recently purchased chocolate ice cream. As I had eaten so well yesterday, I am giving myself a lighter day in terms of meals and will cook a cheese omelette for myself accompanied by some salad which will be more than enough. Thinking ahead to my our Yorkshire trip my family is quite large but how many of them we will eventually meet is uncertain. But, in theory there are my sister’s four children, their collective total of twelve grandchildren and two great grandchildren. So in discussion with my American friend, we are going to fill the pages of a little hardback book so that she can work out who is who when we meet.

Domestic political news seems to be dominating the news headlines as the new day dawns. One of the most important tasks facing the government is to find a way in which the offenders convicted of the manslaughter of a policeman can be removed from the ‘Early Release’ scheme. This was NOT murder (as intent was not proved) as the young policeman was dragged along the road by a car speeding to get away from the interventions of the police but the public campaign to release him is enormous. Andy Burnham has instructed the Justice Secretary to ‘find a way’ to prevent the early release and the legal difficulty is that there is no special offence in law for the killing of an emergency worker. This will no doubt to be remedied in further legislation but this cannot be enacted retrospectively. Last night when I returned from my nightly peregrination in the park with my American friend, I settled down to watch the European athletics competition which is being hosted in Birmingham (but with disappointing crowds so far) There is no doubt that the Norwegians are a dominant force in European athletics at the moment and one of their stars returned from injury to win the 5,000 metres with an astonishing sprint over the last 100 metres. The event to which I was looking forward was the mixed (i.e. men and women) 4 x 400 metres relay race and this was very exciting. The Norwegian quartet won the race but the Brits turned in a very creditable silver and were in contention until the very end. The evening concluded with a brilliant run by a young rising star, Amy Hunt, who won the 100 metres spring final at the very end of the evening. This young athlete has been tipped for great things by those in the know but it was a wonderful sight to see her triumphing on her home soil. One has to feel sorry for the young British shot putter who has come 4th for the fourth time in a major competition. This position, without a medal obviously, is said to be the hardest to bear in all athletics as it is just outside the medals. The weather continues to be hot without even the hint of rain. One of the latest fires to devastate the countryside is in the New Forest where the vegetation is crisp but satellite photos of the UK show that that the whole country has turned from England’s ‘green and pleasant land’ to an orange-brown crisp. I am amazed that we have not yet any disconnections of the water supply because supplies must be running critically low – ironically enough Chopin’s ‘Raindrop Prelude’ is being played on ClassicFM’s play list as I type. Andy Burnham, having returned from a brief holiday, is turning his attention to Britain’s High Streets and is said to be contemplating a crackdown on the vape and betting shops which seem to be the only parts of the urban scene showing a profit at the moment. Labour has crept ahead of Reform by a couple of percentage points with the ‘Burnham bounce’ and we have the interesting by-election on Thursday night in which the principal contenders are Nigel Farage on the one hand and ‘Count BinFace’ on the other. In this farcical election in which there are 34 candidates, BinFace may just garner 20% of the vote but a win seems out of the question.

Having been to Pilates in the middle of the day, I returned and had the lightest of salad lunches because I must leave space for U3A Curry Club  dinner this evening which is being held in a village not too distant from here. One my long standing Pilates friends seemed somewhat morose in the class today and I suspected that I knew the reason why because her dog and life companion had been very ill. She had previously sent me wonderful messages of support whilst Meg had been ill so the least I could do was to offer her some similar comfort in her hour of need. Her dog had been in a veterinary hospital for a couple of weeks and will have a blood test in about a week to determine what if any further courses of treatment there are to be. Fearing the worst and knowing that we have no Pilates class next week, I have given my Pilates class mate an open invitation to come and spent an afternoon having tea and/or ice cream with me and my American friend in the garden. Whether she will accept or not I cannot tell but I wanted her to know that she has friends around her and she will not be forgotten. I viewed some of the video footage of the terrible earthquake in Colombia. Sometimes these quakes occur in the middle of the night and can, of curse, strike at any hour of the day or not but normally any video images are of the extensive damage after an earthquake. But many images are circulating of buildings seconds before their collapse and then their subsequent collapse into streets full of terrified and screaming people. The number killed in yesterday’s 7.4-magnitude earthquake in Colombia, the strongest quake in the South American country in the 21st century, has risen to more than 220 but I fear that it will number in the thousands once the full scale of the destruction becomes known. My energy supplier which is the  UK’s biggest energy supplier urges people to use less electricity between 6-8pm tomorrow. Octopus Energy, the country’s biggest household energy supplier, is urging customers to use less electricity during the solar eclipse tomorrow. The window from 6-8pm is expected to have an impact on the electricity grid. Solar generation will be hit as 95% of the sun could be obscured across parts of Britain. Air conditioning, fans and refrigeration are all likely to push electricity use higher. Octopus Energy is incentivising customers to delay using appliances such as washing machines and dishwashers. Those who avoid unnecessary electricity use during the eclipse can earn a free hour of power to use the following weekend. The scheme is known as ‘saving sessions’. Octopus says even a small shift in household demand could help the grid cope with the loss of solar power and reduce the need to bring additional gas-fired power stations online. I am probably going to observe the eclipse on the TV as I do not feel in the least attempted to stare at the sum which, we are being  warned, is so very dangerous and can permanently damage one’s sight but there are warnings a-plenty to the population at large.

Yesterday evolved into a wonderful day. After my normal weekend routines, my American friend called around  and then we cooked a special dish of pork ribs with a red-eye sauce that we had purchased together in the Alcester branch of Waitrose that we visited last Friday. Red-eye gravy gets its name from its visual appearance. When black coffee is added to hot ham pan drippings, a layer of golden-red grease floats on top of the darker liquid. In a round bowl or plate, this pool of fat resembles a bloodshot human eye and hence the name. We served this with some purple sprouting broccoli, sprouts and a stir fry mixture I had prepared earlier and it was absolutely delicious with the meat just dropping off the ribs after half an hour in the oven. After this wonderful meal and a bottle of shared Asti Spumante that we have both come to enjoy with our shared Sunday meal we indulged in a little post-prandial snooze (although I took the opportunity to read most of ‘The Sunday Times’) We rounded off the afternoon with a delayed sweet of custard pies accompanied by some strawberry ice cream I had purchased earlier on in the day. But the highlight of our evening was yet to some. We viewed the J B Priestly film of ‘An Inspector Calls’ which lays bare the pretensions and class privileges of a middle class family at the turn of the century, each member of the family in turn having been exposed (by the Inspector) to a role in the death of a young women in a  horrible suicide. This play is gripping in its psychological intensity and always worth a further viewing. After that the iPlayer ran onto the next item which was a dramatisation of Dylan Thomas’s ‘Under Milk Wood’. This is not everyone’s cup of tea as it is really one long extended ‘sound-fest’ in the day of a small Welsh fishing village. In Dylan Thomas’s famous 1954 radio play ‘Under Milk Wood‘, the fictional Welsh seaside village is named Llareggub—which is famously ‘bugger all’ spelled backwards. This cheeky hidden joke reflects the quirky, earthy, and humorous tone of the town’s eccentric residents. For this production, the BBC had assembled the cream of Welsh literati who contributed little sound clips including Michal Sheen, Charlotte Church, Tom Jones, Sîean Philips and many more besides. In fact my friend has asked me to look out the complete cast list so that we can identify more of the characters. There is some vicious black humour contained within the work of which that ticked my fancy was the case of the downtrodden Mr. Pugh who frequently imagines poisoning his nagging wife while reading Lives of the Great Poisoners, a book he hides under a brown-paper cover and pretends to be reading a Theological text. These murderous, often comedic, plots remain purely in his imagination rather than being carried out. So after our wonderful evening’s entertainment, we planned out our week together  as  I have a Curry Club U3A meal out on Tuesday and on Wednesday we have plans to observe the 90% partial eclipse of the sun together (probably on the TV, given the danger of looking directly at the eclipsed sun). Having my February holiday in mind and asking my son if he would schedule taking us to the airport, I noted the following disturbing news item which is the airport parking change that is catching Britons out – and landing them £100 fines. Anyone picking up or dropping off at some UK airports this summer is being urged to avoid a costly mistake. Birmingham, Gatwick, Heathrow, Luton, Manchester and Stansted are among the airports now using automatic number plate recognition to track how long you park for and how much you owe. That means there are no barriers prompting you to pay, so you’ll have to remember to pay online or by phone, with the deadline being midnight the following day in most airports. If you do not pay on time, you’ll get a parking charge that could range from £80 to £100 – though is reduced if paid in 14 days. In the late morning, I walked down into  town to pick up a newspaper and to have a coffee in Waitrose. I ensured that I sought out the shade whenever I could which covered at least half of the journey back 

This afternoon I stumbled across a program on the Sky Mix channel detailing the ways in which customs officials in Australia deal with contraband  entering the country which includes not only drugs but seeds, meat products as well as people attempting to enter Australia on a tourist visa and then seeking work. After due process, may of these infractions resulted in the visas being withdrawn and the miscreant put onto the next flight back to whence they came but apart from drugs, importation of banned substances was typically met with confiscation and a huge fine. In the late afternoon, the sight of some huge brambles in our back garden got too much to bear so I went and cropped the worst offenders but this entailed a lot of chopping of extremely long tendrils into shorter lengths so that they would fit in the wheelie bin (which is now full) There is a bonus to all of this which is a big crop of blackberries amidst all of the prickles  but I will leave this for another day before I attempt to pick a supply. After my walk in the park, I have the European Athletics championships to enjoy and they are actually held in Birmingham this year. There promises to be a host of interesting events between 8.00pm and 10.00pm and the women’s 4 x 400 relay should be exciting and interesting to watch and probably a more exciting watch than the football. An unfortunate record has been set in the wee small hours of the morning as a boat carrying 230 migrants made it across the channel and this easily exceeded the last ‘record’ of 165. It looks as though the people smugglers are changing their tactics and relying upon a smaller number  of crossings but in bigger boats. That having been said, the battle against the small boats is gradually being won as a total of 15,049 people are known to have crossed the Channel illegally on 224 small boats so far this year but as of 9 August, the number of small boat arrivals is down by 42% compared to the same period in 2025. The fine weather we have been experiencing must be working in favour of the small boat crossings because they diminish in the winter months and when the weather is stormy.