As I woke yesterday morning just after 6.00am it was still quite dark outside so I allowed myself the luxury of an extra half an in bed although I do like to be all up, showered and with my Pilates exercises undertaken before the Politics programmes start at 8.30am. I knew that yesterday was going to be some of the women’s rugby quarter finals and the first match I saw was South Africa vs New Zealand, known as the ‘Black Ferns’ and the South Africans through sheer power and strength were holding New Zealand to a 10:10 draw at half time. But then, at half time, the Black Ferns evidently decided to play a much more fee-running game and at the start of the second half scored, I think, three tries in about eight minutes, after which the outcome of the game was never to be going to be in doubt. In the other game, Canada completely swept aside Australia so now we await two more quarter finals to be played later in the day.

Last night was the ‘Last Night of the Proms’ and this, for me, always symbolises the end of summer – I was amazed it had come around so quickly. In past years, I have not always enjoyed this and cannot stand the overt nationalism and jingoism that is manifest, even though it is a traditional institution by now. But I surprised myself by really enjoying last night’s concert. I think the BBC and the concert organisers had done a magnificent job in allowing he expression of national sentiments without the excessive and vulgar nationalism which had been displayed in the past. Some of the pieces chosen were interesting such as a medley of songs from ‘My Fair Lady’ as well as harking back to bygone decades with a landmark performance of Queen’s iconic Bohemian Rhapsody to mark the song’s 50th anniversary, featuring band members Sir Brian May and Roger Taylor. There was a rendition of ‘Danny Boy’ with the words displayed on the screen. But in the year of Meg’s death, this was poignant in the extreme and I did have a silent weep. I reproduce some of the sentiments below:

But when ye come, and all the flowers are dying
If I am dead, as dead I well may be,
Ye’ll come and find the place where I am lying,
And kneel and say an Ave there for me;
And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me,
And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be,
For you will bend and tell me that you love me,
And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me!

In practice most of the flags displayed were small square EU flags adorned with the circle of stars but one did see the occasional Union Flag as well. I gather that a campaign group appalled by Brexit is responsible for this display of flags but to my mind, I thought the BBC had navigated its way through the culture wars pretty well and I found the whole concert proved to be both tasteful and moving. But on the streets of London yesterday there was a huge nationalist demonstration called ‘Save the Kingdom’ in which well over 100,000 marched and,together with counter protesters, the estimate is that 150,000 took to the streets of London yesterday. Evidently the far right was delighted and some of their more thuggish elements made their presence felt and 26 police officers were injured, some of them quite seriously. There was a great mixture of motivations amongst the marchers but undoubtedly there was a huge anti-immigration feeling manifest and both legal and illegal migrants were lumped together in this display of nationalistic feeling (which I must say is somewhat reminiscent of what conditions must have been like when the Nazis swept to power, legally, in 1930’s Germany) After I had watched the politics programmes broadcast on Sunday morning, I walked down into town to pick up the copy of my Sunday newspaper and had a coffee on Waitrose. I bumped into a couple of dog-walking acquaintances on the way down and then came home to prepare myself some lunch, which was a curry to suit a cold day. Then I watched the Ireland-France rugby match which was exciting in the extreme and to use an old sporting cliché it was a game pf of two halves with the Irish dominating the first half but the French gradually overhauled the Irish in the second. But for a mistake, the Irish could have scored a try in the closing seconds of the game to secure a victory, the game was so close. In the afternoon my daughter-in-law came round by prior arrangement and as the weather was cold and windy outside were quite content to watch the last rugby quarter final which was England vs. Scotland. My son came to join us in the late afternoon and we watched England overwhelm Scotland, although Scotland did manage to score a consolation try at the very end of the game. We now have some exciting semi-finals set up for next weekend as well.

The next week is going to be an interesting one politically. President Trump is due to make a scheduled visit to the UK next week and one wonders whether the British media will ask him constant questions about the non-release of the Epstein files.  I am sure the UK will try their hardest to ensure that this does not happen. At the same time, there is quite a deal of speculation over the state of Trump’s health and he does appear to have noticeably slowed down in the course of the last week. It could well be that the whole of the Starmer premiership is under increased scrutiny followed the revelation of emails detailing the friendship of Mandelson with the convicted paedophile, Epstein so it will be an interesting week, politically. As the one-time Labour Prime Minister opined decades ago ‘a week can be a long time in politics’ and one can only speculate what the next week will bring. But we do know that Autumn storms are now well and truly upon is and most of England is covered by storm warnings for the next few days. Today when I walked into town, I was glad of my leather jacket and suspect that I will need a warm waterproof for the next few days ahead as well.

Yesterday, the media airwaves were full of the details of the hunt for the person who assassinated Charlie Kirk, the extreme American right-wing polemicist who had been invited to give a speech at the University of Utah. Video images emerged of the assassin who had fired the lethal shot from the roof of an overlooking building at a range that was comparatively easy for a rifle with a telescopic sight. The assassin was caught within about 33 hours of the event because grainy video images were obtained which showed him leaping off the roof of a building and running across to some nearby woods. A massive number of resources were deployed to hunt for the killer as he was such an influential figure even within the White House but eventually, the killer, Tyler Robinson, was turned over to the police by his own family. We then, in the middle of the day, had the most extraordinary news conference I think I have ever seen. If this news conference had taken place in the UK, we would have had a fairly sober statement by a senior police officer along the lines of ‘A 25 year old man has been apprehended and is now in police custody’ but, of course, this was America. The first person to speak was the State Governer who opened with the words ‘We got him!’ who then went on to state that he wished the death penalty to be applied. This was followed by a rambling address by the head of the FBI which was was partisan as it was possible to be. He gave his view that he regarded Charlie Kirk as a brother with a very strange reference to seeing him in Valhalla. The term ‘Valhalla’ used by the FBI chief led to confusion online about why Patel, who was raised Hindu, would reference Valhalla for Kirk, an outspoken Christian. Patel was labelled as incompetent for the major confusion and has now come under the fire over his ‘Valhalla’ comment. Patel, whose roots trace back to Gujarat, was born and raised in a Hindu family though he does not speak about his religion publicly. ‘Indian guy saying that he’ll see a Christian in Valhalla is some confused theology,’ wrote one commenter on X. One account commented, ‘I feel a little guilty for laughing about this, but Kash Patel invoking Valhalla is funny on several levels. We do not believe in Valhalla, you dork. This is so not the time or place to be cute’ wrote another. Another pointed out that FBI actually did nothing to nab Tyler Robinson, the suspected shooter who killed Charlie Kirk. He was turned in by his father and Kash Patel came to the press conference making the cringiest comment. So the whole press conference was quite short on facts, very long on self-congratulation and how well the various police forces had worked with each other and a degree of political partisanship that would have been unthinkable in the British context.  When the killer comes to trial, the question is bound to be raised whether this will in any way fit the notion of a ‘fair trial’ and the call for a death penalty immediately after the arrest and before the killer has even been charged seems extraordinarily prejudicial – but this is America after all. Charlie Kirk himself was on record as saying that in order to defend the free availability of guns, the murder of several school children across the United States each year ws a price that it was necessary to pay to avoid gun control. The question I repeatedly raised as to how such a political assassination could occur but the point evident to almost everybody outside the USA is that right wing polemicists are allowed to say the most outrageous things in the name of free speech, then it is hardly surprising if there are some in the society who do no agree. Of course, political assassination is never an answer but the USA has quite a long history of political assassinations compared with the rest of the world and as well as Abraham Lincoln we can cite Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther Luther King and so on. One is tempted to argue that political debate should be balanced by giving those who disagree with right wing polemicists the same degree of financial backing and media adulation as the right wingers themselves. I imagine that those who disagree with the right-wing polemicists think that the odds are so stacked against them that a fair debate is never possible and that is what leads them to contemplate assassination.

Turning to domestic matters, our domestic help had reported a leak from our washing machine but I had not dared to move this un aided until my son and daughter-in-law had returned from holiday. Once we got the washing machine out, we identified the problem which was that an outlet hose had been chewed through probably by a mouse that had entered via a redundant air vent on the back wall of the house. However, we discovered also that a filter unit had seized tight and could not be removed, probably as a result of neglect as I had not looked at this for months whilst caring for Meg in her final months. So the question was raised whether it was worth calling out an engineer for a machine that we think was about seven years old and with a limited life. As a Bosch engineer call out charge is in the region of £100 plus parts and then VAT on top, you ae faced with the problem that the repair might be in the region of a third of the cost of a new machine. This is not an easy decision to make but eventually the three of us (my son, daughter-in-law and myself) decided to bite the bullet and order a new machine as spending money on a machine with a limited life does not seem to be a good idea. So, we ordered a model from John Lewis which will be delivered in a few days’ time and to sweeten the bitter pill, as it were, by choosing a particular mid-range model the two-year warranty offered by John Lewis could be extended free upon application to five years so this seemed to be the most sensible long term decision to make. Of course, people are having to make these kinds of calculations with all kinds of cars and domestic appliances and the answer is never a straightforward one as after a repair one can either be lucky or unlucky – peace of mind is often the deciding factor whatever the initial cost.

As I awoke yesterday, ClassicFM was playing ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ and there is certainly more of an autumnal feel in the air. Naturally, the mornings are starting to get a little darker as we start the countdown towards Christmas and the turn of the year. We often, though, get quite a spell of fine weather at this time of the year and September and October I quite enjoy although I always think that November (a bit like February) is just a month to be ‘lived’ through. In domestic politics, the Mandelson affair rumbles on with massive questions being asked about the PM’s judgement. After all, Peter Mandelson had got form, as it were, having being forced to resign on at least two previous occasions. The fact that he was doing rather a good job in his relationship the Trump administration in the USA is neither here nor there – why the PM appointed him is almost beyond belief. When emails emerged of exchanges between the two men showing Lord Mandelson remaining supportive of Epstein even after he was convicted for the sex trafficking of underage girls, it was clear he had to go. Lord Mandelson tried to cling on. The PM summarily relieved him of his duties. There had initially been an appetite to keep him, in order to avoid embarrassing Donald Trump, who himself is being asked questions about his association with Epstein – and hates it. But when these emails emerged, it was clear to No 10 that the scandal would blow up the state visit and Mandelson had to go. As it stands at the moment, the planned visit of Trump to the UK is going to be awkward in the extreme but nobody would actually ask the ‘elephant in the room’ observation which is that Mandelson’s association and friendship with the convicted paedophile Epstein led directly to his sacking whereas in Trump’s case, he now occupies the White House.  The liberal American media (which does exist!) seem to have convinced themselves that the Epstein files contain details of Trump’s past misdeeds with underage girls supplied by Epstein but, of course, the detailed file will never be released under the current administration. The Democrats are clinging to the hope that elections next year will give them some leverage. All 435 U.S. House seats and 35 U.S. Senate seats will be up for grabs in the 2026 midterm elections. While control of the presidency is not at stake, midterm elections can have important consequences for the occupant of the Oval Office. This is likely to be an especially significant midterm because it will be the first opportunity for voters across the entire nation to express their views on the drastic changes in the role of the executive branch and in many government policies during the first two years of the second Trump administration. The results of the 2026 midterm elections will go a long way toward determining whether Congress will continue to largely support the president’s agenda or will act as a check on the power of the White House. The liberal American media are also advancing two theories, each of which has a certain credibility. One is that after Trump fell out with Epstein over a property deal, Trump became an FBI informant to help to ‘spill the dirt’ on Epstein and this is not completely denied by the current administration. The other is quite speculative but quite plausible. Epstein appears to have all kinds of funds at his disposal but never filed any accounts for any of his business dealings. The theory is that Epstein invited billionaires into his reach, supplied them with underage girls for sex and then successfully blackmailed these rich billionaires who would pay him large amounts of money to prevent this news becoming public which would result in conviction and gaol for a very long time. This is all quite plausible but, of course proving it is another matter.

Before I went into town, I spent a certain amount of time going through past editions of the newspaper, retaining the things (generally health related) that I wished to keep and these I will need at some point to comprehensively file. Then, later in the morning, I took the car down to the Waitrose car park and picked up a copy of my newspaper. Then I struck up a conversation over the coffee machine and then in the seating area with a couple of customers who, as it turned out, was a doctor and his wife who was a midwife. We exchanged some reminiscences about our university days which were similar although we were slightly different generations.  Then I re-parked the car, paid for an hour’s parking and then into what call my Donkey sanctuary café although that is not its proper name. I am always warmly greeted and partake of my usual coffee and homemade cake. Then I got into conversation with a man and his wife who are long standing friends of the proprietor. The husband was shortly going to part of a convey driving to Serbia which was all part of a charity raising effort in which he engages ever year. Then I returned home and prepared a lunch of beef slices served with an onion gravy and served on a bed of lettuce. After lunch, there was an item of mail that I needed to process and this was a circular from CAFOD (Catholic Fund for Overseas Development) where I needed to contact them to remove Meg’s name from their database. If I had not done this, then circulars would have kept on arriving so I felt that I needed to inform them of Meg’s death. I was fortunate to get a very sympathetic person on the end of the phone who agreed to process my request but also to add Meg’s name to a special ‘Book of Remembrance’ This I was not expecting but was quite heartwarming and I conveyed to the CAFOD contact what a magnificent Catholic funeral we had managed to organise, the memory of which is still quite a source of consolation for me.

Yesterday as I walked down into town, and in quite a positive mood once the wedding anniversary date is over, I started to muse about what my life had been like without Meg who I met at the age of 20. I went back to the age of 11 at which I went to boarding school for three years whilst my mother trained to be a teacher. Here life was very full because after school there was our tea, supervised homework and a lot of activities in which to engage. From the age of 14 onwards I attended the school in Leeds and as well as schoolwork then was the Old Swan Hotel at which I worked washing dishes and I acquired my first girlfriend who lived 100 yads down the road and at whose house I seemed to be at constantly. After leaving school at the age of 16, I still worked in the hotel and there was always the girlfriend. Then I started work in the scientific civil service at the age of 17 and the family moved to Leeds where I had the most incredible stroke of luck. Just walking near my house, I bumped into one of my school friends and he introduced me to the group of lads who drank one a week in a local pub and were an instant source of friends. Then a the age of 19 I moved to a civil service post in London where I was lodged in a civil service hostel for the year and helped to organise the sports and social activities for the whole of the London Hostels Association. Then at the age of 20 I went to university where I shared ‘digs’ with three other boys and soon after that I met Meg and the rest is history, The whole point of this little biographyis that from the ages of 11-20, I had never ever lived alone so it was all rather pointless trying to envisage what life had been like before Meg because I was never alone in a house wondering what to do as it were so I do not have any of those cultural resources upon which to draw. I did actually spend some time away from Meg first in a mini-sabbatical at the university in Madrid (where I lived in a hall of residence) and later for a stint in Jakarta, in Indonesia teaching my component of the De Montfort University MBA programme. But even here I was busy preparing lectures of seeing like-minded individuals for a drink so was hardly a social isolate. The whole point is that when you at work and married you do not have to work hard at social relationships because they are all around you ‘on a plate’, as it were, but at this stage of my life things have to be organised and do not happen unless a lot more conscious effort is made to plan and then to engage in them.

Turning to domestic politics, Labour’s deputy leadership contest is on the brink of becoming a two-horse race between Bridget Phillipson and Lucy Powell, as the other three candidates scramble for nominations. The understanding is that it needs to be a woman candidate and someone with Cabinet experience is preferred. Meanwhile, the close association of Lord Mandelson, the British Ambassador in the USA with Epstein, the convicted paedophile is receiving a lot of scrutiny and it is possible that further revelations will come out in the next few days. Some MPs are already demanding that Mandelson should be sacked and one senses that an enforced resignation is not too far distant. Actually, he is now recalled from his post but the Opposition spokesperson is arguing that a recall is not the same as a sacking and has he been sacked or not? Even at the time of his appointment, eyebrows were raised at his appointment particularly as he was jetted in over the head of an outstanding female diplomat who had been expected to become the Ambassador. Keir Starmer’s judgement is now being called into question because iwf some of Mandelson’s suspect prior affiliations were already known about, then why were the vetting procedures of the Foreign Office and presumably the Security services brushed aside? The most charitable thing to be said at this point is that Starmer did not let the row rumble on and on but he has many questions left to answer. The remainder of my morning turned out to be very interesting.  I made sure that I ws down at the Methodist centre for 9.45 so that I was in plenty of time for my second Tai Chi class. This was certainly a little different to the first but equally interesting in its own way. In classes like this and the yoga class I attended a year or so back, I position myself to the front where  I can observe and then copy the actions of the instructor. But there is always a bit of a dilemma because if the instructor is facing you then her left becomes your right and vice versa. I find doing a mirror image of the instructor is the best policy but I need to keep an eye on wat the rest of the class – about fourteen of us this morning – are doing. Then afterwards I had a coffee (and indulged in some cake) with the bank manager with whom I had an interesting chat last week. After he departed, I joined the chatty table and soon found myself in a fascinating conversation with a peripatetic minister who has a supervisory role if the Bromsgrove circuit of Methodist churches. He and I had some very interesting conversations, some of them on matters theological and ecumenical and established several points of contact with each other. He was sympathetic about the recent loss of Meg and his wife had her health difficulties so, to some extent, we knew each one of us was coming from. After this extended chat, I still needed to do my Aldi shopping and collect my newspaper so it was practically 2.00pm by the time I got home. Under the circumstances, I made myself a ‘quickie’ lunch of anchovies on sourdough bread served with a good dollop of 1000 Island dressing and finally got round to unpacking the shopping. After a busy morning like this, I am glad to have a quiet afternoon.

The day before yesterday being what would have been our 58^th wedding anniversary was a day of which I did not mourn the passing – in fact, I wanted it to be over as soon as possible so that painful memories would not be longer be so readily evoked. But what really astonished the whole world was the way in which Isael had launched on an attack on the Hamas negotiators in the Gulf State of Qatar. The Israelis justify their action by saying that Hamas officials, wherever they are located, were responsible for the initial attacks against Israel and therefore need to be hunted down and destroyed. They did kill six people including the son of one of the chief negotiators but did not actually kill the negotiators at whom the strikes were aimed. This attack on an Arab nation not involved in the war against Israel was unprecedented but has the effect of killing any attempts at a negotiated peace deal now completely impossible. The Israeli view is that the negotiators were only playing for time and were never at all serious in their negotiations and Israel will continue attacking Hamas until ever remnant of Hamas is destroyed and the whole of Gaa is cleared. The view of the Americans is interesting and the question posed whether America sanctioned o gave a ‘green light’ to the attack. Bu the Americans only seemed to be informed when the Israeli airforce was in the air and could not be recalled and it was the American military that broke the news to the rest of the American establishment. Trump himself has not expressed a view but the White House briefing, whilst not condemning Israel, did give a coded indication about American unhappiness. Sky News reports that President Trump is clearly angry and frustrated by the Israeli attack on Doha, saying he was ‘very unhappy about every aspect of it. Speaking to reporters in Washington last night, he made his displeasure known:

‘I am not thrilled about the whole situation. It’s not a good situation, but I will say this – we want the hostages back, but we are not thrilled about the way that went down today.,,,I am never surprised by anything, especially when it comes to the Middle East.’ In a post on his social media site earlier, Trump wrote that the decision to attack was taken by the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and not by him. And that by the time his administration had been notified of the attack – by the US military – it was too late to stop the bombing. He added that unilaterally bombing Qatar, which he described as a strong ally and friend of the United States, did not advance Israel or America’s goals. As though the escalation of one international conflict is not bad enough, it appears that Russia is making bigger and bolder attacks on the Ukraine capital. News has emerged that Russian drones have invaded Polish air space and have had to be intercepted but whether this is Putin attempting to widen the war or the whole escapade is a military mistake is not clear at the time of writing.

When I awoke yesterday, I contemplated staying in bed a little longer as the mornings are now quite dark but I allowed myself only an extra 15 minutes in bed. My plans for the day are a little out of joint because I have the hairdresser calling for a postponed visit half way through the morning and I have a leak emanating from the washing machine that I need to identify and to remedy if possible. As I do not want to put my back out by moving the washing machine single handed, I might delay this for a day or so until my son can give me some assistance in a day or so.

Our hairdresser was scheduled to call in the late morning so I made a quick walk down te hill to pick up my newspaper. Whilst I was drinking my (free) coffee I had a chat with a fellow coffee drinker who, as it turned out, had been a teacher. She and I exchanged reminiscences about our COVID experiences and how we coped at the time. I would have liked us to have chatted a little longer but she had to shoot off to a gym class but I gave her one of my business cards with details of the blog on it in case she wanted to follow it up. Then it was back up the hill and a wait for our hairdresser to call. We both had a cry on each other’s shoulders for similar reasons. I had my anniversary day the day before that I longed to be over as soon as it started whilst my hairdresser had been off to quite an upsetting funeral. It was the funeral of one of her brother’s best friends and, as is normal at funerals, there re lots of photos of the departed best friend. But being best friends meant that the hairdresser’s own brother appeared in photo after photo and this had been quite upsetting for other. But she went to bed early and felt a lot better after a good night’s sleep. I had just finished watching a YouTube view on ‘Social Relationships’ when my Droitwich friend phoned and we exchanged details of what we had both been up to in the next few days and, like my two chats yesterday, one always feels  a bit better after a chat with a relative or friend. Tomorrow will be my second session of ‘Tai Chi’ with an instructor who is the mother of the instructor that we had last week and, we have been warned, to expect something completely different from the first week. I will certainly persist with this for a few weeks. I fully appreciate that I have concentrate both on my breathing and also on ‘mindfulness’ (banishing all other worries from your mind whilst exercising) Last week, my knees and hips were feeling the strain somewhat as many of my Pilates exercises are actually conducted whilst rolling around on a mat. But, like other things in life, I hope I can make small incremental improvements week by week. I have purchased an illustrated book on ‘Tai Chi’ but had rather wished the photographs had been fewer in quantity but coloured instead of black-and-white plates (produced this way, no doubt, to keep the cost of the book down)

So yesterday was/would have been our 58th wedding anniversary and was most definitively a day to which I was not looking forward whatsoever but just wanted to get through. I had tried to make plans to go out for the day but these have fallen through so I will rely upon the usual routines associated with a Tuesday which are to meet some of my friends for a coffee in Wetherspoons followed by my weekly Pilates session. I did indulge myself a little the night before by looking at some of the websites available on Prime on coping with the grieving process but leaving aside the American psychobabble, of which there is quite a lot, I hardly learnt anything at all. Practically off of their recommendations I am already doing but one UK British psychotherapist informed me that that wedding anniversaries, as they were devoted to you and your married partner focused solely on each other rather than on a birthday, were in his experience the hardest of all anniversaries to cope with. The psyschotherapist had experienced the death of his wife eight years previously and I suppose I should applaud his honesty but it was really not what I wanted to hear. He spoke about living in the ‘Now’ rather than I the past which I am rather struggling to understand – after all, it is not possible to wake up alongside one’s spouse for an estimated 21,000 plus times and not miss them is it? But instead of wallowing in self-indulgence (which I am sure my son would say to me) I did locate a source of some 22 well-chosen quotes to help you come to terms with the end of a relationship and these I have put in a link and forwarded to my own email so that I can print them off and will read them to myself over breakfast.

One good thing to lighten my mood before I went to bed last night was a revelation from some of the Epstein files handed over to a Congressional Committee in the USA. Files from a ‘birthday book’ compiled for the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein appear to include a glowing contribution from the current UK ambassador to Washington, Peter Mandelson. The pages are contained in files from the estate of the deceased billionaire paedophile, handed over to a Congressional committee. The collection of birthday tributes includes a hand-drawing of a woman’s body, signed ‘Donald’. This drawing is handed over and is now published for all of the world to see. What is fascinating is that this drawing Donald Trump has variously proclaimed ‘not to exist’ (but now that we know that it does) or to be a fake which is the Trump response to anything he does not like. Donald Trump is suing Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal for publishing the information about the letter but now it is all in the public domain and does not look good for Trump as his previous denials are exposed as a complete lie. So, Trump can either drop his law suit (unlikely) or can go ahead and have to defend himself in a court where the evidence against him is pretty damning. The comments overall from the liberal media are that none of this looks at all good for Trump and his usual tactic of a threatening a huge law suit to silence critics may well backfire.

In the morning, I spent quite a lot of time with our domestic help talking over family matters (both hers and my own) here I always welcome her advice. Then I walked down the hill and made my way to Wetherspoons where I made contact with one of my regular coffee mates. The kitchens in Wetherspoons are being renovated for the next fortnight so all of the regulars will have to do without their daily supply of food and this probably explains why the pub was so quiet today. After chatting with one friend, I spent a few minutes with the other and struck for home, knowing that I had my Pilates session later on in the day. I changed into shorts (as I had promised my fellow classmates) and then went down for the session by car not in the best of spirits or moods as I could not stop reflecting on the first wedding anniversary on my own since Meg’s passing. But I think that one hour of exercise probably helped to lift my mood a little, although I always knew that today was one to be endured rather than enjoyed. Out of interest, I did consult this blog for a year ago and noted that Meg was still quite ‘compus mentis’ on our last anniversary, We had been to  ‘The Lemon Tree Cafe‘ on the morning of the anniversary and then some friends called round in the afternoon and we shared a bottle of Prosecco. The following day, we had gone down the hill and shared a chocolate cake (donated by Waitrose) and I believe that Meg had enjoyed all of this but her decline was to accelerate, particularly after the chest infection just after Christmas and she had died with eight months of our last anniversary. As soon as I arrived home after my Pilates session, I treated myself to a mackerel risotto which I made according to my tried and trusted recipe but I tried not to make it too large. At the end of this, I received a telephone call from the Honda garage which used to supply us with a Motability vehicle and our contact was probably trying to arrange a servicing which is due about this time. When I informed him that Meg had died, he seemed shocked and absolutely lost for words although this cannot be such an extraordinary event for Motability customers. Even later, I got an automated text from our doctor’s surgery to arrange a COVID booster jab in about a months’ time. Fortunately, I could do all of this via the automated system and I replied immediately to the text to ensure that I was well and truly in the system for my booster. Last year, Meg and I received the booster directly from a District Nurse but evidently this year, I shall attend the surgery in about a month’s time.

Yesterday when I awoke it was still quite dark as the nights are drawing on as we march inevitably towards the shortest day in December. As I have no particular commitments today, I decided to give myself the luxury of an extra half an hour in bed. I have got used over the months of getting up at 6.00am which is largely a hangover from the days n which I had to get myself up and things turned around before the carers came to care for Meg at about 8.00 each morning. There were days at the weekends when the schedule of the carers was to start at 7.00am and this necessitated me getting up at 5.00am but those days are over. Last night, although it is not really my ‘cup of tea’ there was a live football match in which Northern Ireland were playing Germany and the Germans have had a terrible run of failures recently so they felt they had a real point to prove. By half time, the Germans had scored but Northern Ireland had equalised so the second half could have been quite an interesting and tense affair. In the event, the Northern Irish gave away a soft goal and I lost interest at this point and  amused myself by watching one of the re-broadcast episodes of ‘Rising Damp’ which tends to be shown on an obscure channel at 7.50 each evening.
The domestic political agenda has two stories running which one has the feeling will ‘run and run’. One of these is the fact that after the resignation of Angela Raynor, the Labour party needs to elect a new deputy leader, Angela Raynor having been elected to this position months ago. We are in the period just before the Labour Party conference and so we shall be treated to the spectacle of the Labour party tearing itself apart, which is hardly news these days. Given the rightwards drift of the party, MPs and the wider electorate will want to elect a person reflecting the views of someone on the left of the party but there is no self-evident candidate so we shall see the Labour party tearing itself apart over this. The wider public, one feels, will have no interest in all of this whilst the right-wing press will absolutely relish it all, not wanting an opportunity to pass by in which the present government can receive a drubbing. The second and somewhat more horrifying political story is the flip-flopping which the Reform leader, Nigel Farage, is conducting on the subject of Afghan refugees. Farage cannot resist an opportunity to pander to the populist and prejudiced parts of public opinion and is now suggesting that Afghan female refugees will be returned to Afghanistan where one can only imagine the terrible punishments that will be inflicted upon them by the Taliban. Only in the last few days has it been reported that a woman was publicly flogged for the ‘crime’ of walking in the open unaccompanied by a male relative or escort. So, it is almost certain that an Afghan asylum seeker would be subject to almost unimaginable forms of torture in which Farage would be complicit by organising their return. The distressing feature about all of this is that one gets the feeling that Farage and other Reform supporters do not care about any of this and are in step with those parts of British public opinion who just want the asylum seekers and small boat problem to go away at whatever social and political cost.  Of course, in all of this we are only following the examples of the Americans who are lifting people off the streets to imprison and then to deport them, even if they have lived in the States for decades and contributed to the USA economy.

In the morning, I walked down into town stopping briefly to chat with my good Irish friends who has just returned home from an extended holiday and naturally I was pleased to see them. They informed that since our French friend has moved out, the house is now occupied by a lady and her daughter who I no doubt get to meet in the fullness of time. When walking back up the hill, I was recognised by a lady who I knew vaguely by sight but she had often spotted me pushing Meg up and down the hill and then entering Waitrose for my daily newspaper. She was very kindly ad sympathetic to my new status and explained how she had been a widow for 19 years her husband having died in his late 50’s but she herself indicated that she tried to get out as much as she could and bump into people. There is a fair chance that I might see her again in Waitrose but I now peregrinate between Wetherspoons, the Methodist Centre and the Donkey Sanctuary cafe according to the day of the week. Naturally, I am very keen to develop and cultivate whatever the social relationships come my way as some of my long established friends in the area are selling up and moving away. Near the top of the hill, I also had a chat with another near neighbour who I happen to know was ill at about the same time as I was several years ago but much more severely with a cancer, some of which has now returned. I made myself some lunch which was the simple expedient of some beef slices heated up in an onion gravy and then served on top of some salad which as actually pretty tasty. Although the weather was a little threatening, I managed to get the back lawn cut. However, I was more than a little dismayed that because of the building work that is taking place in the large field at the bottom pf my garden two temporary office block type of temporary buildings had been erected as near to the bottom of my garden (say about 2 ft away) as it was possible to get and much nearer to my property than any one of my neighbours. These buildings are to be used as temporary office accommodation whilst the rest of the building work is undertaken. Of course, there is absolutely nothing I could have done about this but what used to be a view over open countryside is now obscured by these temporary buildings. I suppose I shall just have to shut my eyes and pretend that they do not exit although I suspect they will be there for at least a couple of years. If they were permanent buildings, I suspect that they would not have been permitted under planning regulations but in the meantime, I will just have to grin and bear it.

The evening before yesterday, I attended my local church and I had a particular reason for doing so. It was the first service conducted by our new, and very young, parish priest who had previously served as an assistant priest in Coventry and before that in Leamington Spa. By way of introduction, he gave us a few words about his own biography and as he indicated, he is well acquainted with this wider region even if not Bromsgrove itself. I am sure that he will be a tremendous asset to the parish and he certainly made all of the right noises, as it were. It must be quite a daunting prospect to introduce oneself to a well-established, even if ageing, congregation such as ours and I thought that the sermon that he gave hit just the right note. There is going to be a special inauguration in about seven weeks time in the pub with a large meeting room across the road for which one needs to sign up. I must admit that I forgot on my way out of church but as I suspect that the list will soon fill up, I am going to make a special journey to the church this morning for the sole purpose of adding my name to the list. In the congregation last night was an elderly Irish parishioner who is very committed to the church and has often delivered some of the readings in a delightfully soft Irish brogue. But over a year ago, he was diagnosed with terminal oesophageal cancer and his doctors had given him three months to live. But he still with us after a whole year, but I must say only just and is now painfully thin and receiving morphine injections and had made the most tremendous effort to attend the church and to greet the new priest. We used to see him on a Tuesday morning when we were having coffee in Waitrose and I even have a photograph of him and I with Meg and our University of Birmingham friend that was taken last Christmas. I find this man a completely inspirational figure and was delighted to see him for what could be the last time and I will certainly mourn his passing and attend his funeral which cannot be too far off now. To a man of such deep faith, then perhaps death holds no fears but how remarkable it is that he still making a positive impact upon the world when he is absolutely defying all of the medical odds. When I returned home, I managed to watch almost the whole of the England vs Australia women’s rugby match which, in the end, England won quite convincingly. But the English team did not start well whereas the Australians did so it looked as though it was going to be a much tighter match than it turned out to be. Apart from handling errors, what often sets teams apart is the level of fitness of the individual players where the teams who have players who have had superior training regimes have the strength and endurance to enter and to succeed in the scrums, mauls and rucks which is at the heart of the game. There are going to be some tremendous matches this afternoon and if I have no social calls upon my time, then at least I can enjoy the rugby. Sundays are often quite unpredictable days because it all depends upon the social commitments of my friends and acquaintances and, of course, I am acutely aware that Sunday is very much a ‘family’ day for most of the population.

Early in the morning, after I had undertaken my Pilates exercises, I decided to go and visit my local church not for the purpose of attending a service but in order to ensure that my name was added to the list for the inauguration of our new parish priest in late October. When I attended the church for the service the previous evening, we were encouraged to add our names to the list but chatting with others I forgot and only remembered later and as this inauguration event was bound to be popular and numbers might be limited, I was anxious to be included in the list. I bumped into several fellow parishioners that I already knew and was glad that I had made the effort and then I returned home to have a delayed breakfast and a viewing of the Trevor Phillips Politics program on the Sky News channel. Quite nearby there is a sort of water sports centre – actually an area used for the extraction of salt and gravel up until the 1950’s and into which local streams and water courses have now drained0 which is now used for canoing, swimming, sailing and similar water sports. It has a simple cafe so I decided to go there, along, if only to have a coffee and look out over the water. But my University of Birmingham friend phoned after I had texted him earlier in the day  and I was more than happy to accept his offer of a lift to the centre.  It was raining cats and dogs so we sat indoors and drank our coffees whilst catching up on the various things happening to us over the last fortnight. But as he is on holiday in Majorca next weekend, I shall not see him for another fortnight.

I knew that women’s rugby would dominate this afternoon’s TV viewing, so I settled down to watch the New Zealand team (the ‘Black Ferns’) take on the Irish team. But the Irish team were completely outplayed and won the match by 40:0. The nearest that the Irish came was a long punt up the field onto which the Irish player just had to drop to score a try but, given the shape of a rugby ball, there was a cruel bounce and the ball bounced out of play. Given the speed, precision and strength of the Black Ferns, I cannot see how they can be beaten in this competition, even by England playing at their best. This might be the eventual final, of course but we shall have to see once the quarter finals and semi-finals have been played. As I write this, France is playing South Africa but at half time, France have established a dominant lead by having scored four tries and will probably go ahead and complete their victory in the second half.

The news yesterday was completely dominated, as you would expect, with the enforced resignation of Angela Raynor, the Deputy Prime Minister, for her tardiness in declaring the correct amount of stamp duty on a property that she was purchasing. The story is a complicated one but basically, she thought she could get away with not declaring the full worth of the property and claiming that it was her prime residence although she was still a trustee of the property she had in trust for her disabled son. My take on all of this was she that she should have realised that as Deputy Prime Minister and in charge of housing to boot, she should have realised (as the HMRC website makes crystal clear) that she was still regarded fo tax purposes as having an interest in her former property. She had tried to cut corners by going to a cut-price form of conveyancers to facilitate the purchase of her new property but should have employed the (much more) expensive law firm that had set up her trust and would have advised her accordingly. Raynor claimed that she had received legal advice on the correct level of stamp duty but the conveyancing firm have riposted that they do not give advice so someone is lying somewhere. So, her offence was breaking the Ministerial Code by not taking sufficient care over her tax affairs and, I think in the court of public opinion, it is felt that the report of the ethics adviser was a fair one and so Raynor had no alternative but to resign. Keir Starmer has engaged in a large-scale reshuffle of his cabinet a lot of which was in the offing in any case and there has been some ‘rearrangement of the deckchairs on the Titanic’ but the movement of politicians to new responsibilities seems quite sensible to me and may mean that the government looks as though as it had a bit more purpose than tackling the evident problems. There is no doubt that Nigel Farage and the Reform Party have been setting the political agenda for weeks now and immigration has remained as he most contentious issue as it has done since the five years since Brexit and nine years after the referendum. Incidentally, Research by the Centre for European Reform suggests the UK economy is 2.5% smaller than it would have been if Remain had won the referendum. Public finances fell by £26 billion a year. This amounts to £500 million a week and is growing. The ultimate irony is that had we remained within the EU, we would have found it so much easier to send the ‘small boats’ migrants back to France. In July 2017, the European Court of Justice upheld the Dublin Regulation, declaring that it still stands despite the high influx of 2015, giving EU member states the right to transfer migrants to the first country of entry to the EU. The United Kingdom withdrawal from the European Union took effect at the end of the Brexit transition period on 31 December 2020, at which point the Regulation ceased to apply to it. So the profound adverse consequences of Brexit are still plaguing the country.

The evening before last, there was not much on the TV to interest me so I watched the Scotland vs Denmark football match which was not a great match but was interesting in its way. Scotland were playing in Copenhagen and were very much the underdogs but managed to secure a 0:0 draw and hence one point in the competition which was a pretty good result for them. There is a fair bit of Women’s rugby on the TV today which will probably engage me a little but in the meanwhile, I will settle into a Saturday routine which will include some lawn cutting this afternoon. I still feel waves of relief at having discovered my misplaced garage front door keys without which I might not have been able to access the mower. I was just about to depart on my morning walk down into town when, quite unexpectedly, my son and daughter-in-law dropped in to see me. Evidently, I was very pleased to see them and we exchanged bits of news with each other, one of which is that my daughter-in-law informed that that following her retirement, she too has started some Tai Chi classes. Then they continued on their journey to their South Coast holiday but gave me a lift into town where I met up with one of my Saturday morning friends but not the other. I walked back up the hill and was a little saddened to see that my friend, the French lady who lived down the road, has now definitely sold her house and departed to live in Cheshire with their daughter so this makes two of my friends that I have established over the past 18 years now selling up and moving away. The one consoling feature of this weekend was that I knew there were going to be several of the Women’s World Cup rugby matches and in the first of these, I saw Scotland well defeated by Canada. But the Scots made a pretty good fist of things as the Canada team is a very strong one and could well emerge as overall winners of the competition. The second match I started viewing is very much harder to predict as it was Wales vs. Fiji match and at half time, the Fijians were ahead taking several opportunistic tries. Eventually, Fiji won the entire game by the very small margin of three points. Wales came within inches of scoring a try to win the match but to be honest there were multiple handling errors on both sides which made the final result very unpredictable. Probably, on balance, the Fiji team deserved to win the game and it is only their second win in their world cup history but if Wales had converted some of their tries and made fewer handling errors, the game was well within their grasp but they just failed.  I will be attending church this evening with a particular degree of interest because it should be the first occasion in which we can meet the new and fairly young priest who has been allocated to the parish. I am quite eager to get to know him because some of his theological training was in a seminary in Spain in Valladolid and therefore there is a chance he is a Spanish speaker and we have something in common.

Readers will notice that this blog is on ‘Day 2000’ which seems as though it ought to be marked by something special. I will just confine myself to a few observations about the timings when the blog is written. Whatever the date of the blog, its contents generally refer to what has happened on the preceding day and also to the evening before that. About one half it if is written in the morning (when nothing much has happened save for breaking political news) and then it gets concluded in the late afternoon. At that stage, the draft version is ‘saved’ on the WordPress website but not yet published. But the saved draft of the actual preceding day (but today’s entry) is published (by the simple expedient of a mouse click) I have followed the tradition of composing it in ‘Outlook’ where the draft is saved and I can, in theory, access it from either of my laptops in the Main Lounge or the Music Room which system I devised when I was looking after Meg and has the advantage of a grammar and spelling checker. Then I transfer the contents to a text editor (not a word processor) which is specially written for the MacBook and other Apple hardware and then the contents of the file gets some final checking and some simple HTML added. This and other updated files get transferred into a parallel website that I maintain so if the main site is ever lost or hijacked (these things happen!) I automatically have a backup system on a different server and on my own webspace. 

Today, it is rumoured that the fate of Angela Raynor, the deputy Prine Minister, will be known when the report from the ethics adviser is presented to the Prime Minister. My own gut feeling is that whilst she might be technically cleared, the whole affair does not pass the ‘sniff test’ and there are some words indicating a degree of carelessness which means that her position is untenable. Yesterday, I turned up for a Tai Chi class and although I was there five minutes before the class, I was the first to arrive. It turned out that of the 6-8 people in the class at least five of us were complete beginners – I suppose we were all waiting for the classes to recommence after the summer break before we started on a new venture. Tai Chi is full of soft, flowing movements and one has to concentrate well on correct breathing nd enter a spirit of mindfulness. In general, I found it OK except that by the end of the 45-minute session, my knees and hips were starting to complain somewhat. This is because in my Pilates exercises, much of the session is conducted on the floor instead of one’s feet and the same applies to the 20 minutes of Pilates exercises that I do every morning in the bedroom. When the session was concluded, I treated myself to a cup of coffee and a slice of home-made lemon drizzle cake and got into conversation with another gentleman of about my age for whom this was also a first session. It transpired that in his occupational life he had worked in a bank and so we got into the predictable old men’s talk about how in our day, things were so much better and now everything was going to the dogs. I hope he persists with the Tai Chi and I think he also attends a ‘Health and Balance’ class the preceding day. If this turns out to be the case, then I may have acquired a soulmate with whom to converse. Because of the inevitable facts of biology, most of the members of these coffee mornings and exercise classes are women who have out-survived their husbands so the topics of conversation are often confined to moaning about the state of the traffic and the inconveniences occasioned by the building work going on all across Bromsgrove at the moment. Whilst not being averse to talking about local things, I do lift my sights to larger national and international issues about which topics I would much prefer to converse, as you might imagine.

I walked down into town this morning and was dismayed to be greeted by 21 Union Flags hoisted at the rate of one per every 57 yards. I had previously consulted the web for some background to all of this (which started in a poor white area of Birmingham called Weoly Castle) and came across a discussion as to what parents should tell their children. To 5-6 year olds, the advice was just to say it was people showing pride in their country whereas to teenagers, it should be possible to explain how the racist and xenophobic far-right had expropriated the flag for their own nefarious purposes and for some people, the display of so many flags ‘in your face’ was both provocative and intimidating, (not to mention non-British as we are not an avid flag waving people like the Americans) I had a coffee with one of my usual Tuesday crowd who was taking advantage of the sun on the outdoor benches, Then proceeding along the High Street, I purchased  a gymnastic aid which would help with Pilates exercises and stretches upon which I had had my eye in the Salvation Army shop window and then got some cash out of the ATM in my bank. Then I went along to my usual Friday morning ‘Donkey Care Sanctuary’ cafe where I had a nice chat with the owners and was supplied with coffee and home made cake. By now, I am treated with hugs and kisses when I leave which is rather nice and then I made my way slowly home. I cooked myself a beef curry with onions, peppers, tomatoes, mange-touts, sultanas and apple in the mix – I must say that I found it delicious and have a little left over for another day for a taster dish. For the first time in about a month or even more, I cut the grass which did not look too long but was a bit on the straggly side. I had a few moments of blind panic because it had been so long since I used the mower that I could not find the garage keys to access the mower. Fortunately, in a flash of inspiration I looked at the jar adjacent to my key jar and found that the misplaced keys were nestling at the bottom of a ‘pen’ jar where I must have put them my mistake several weeks ago.